UQ engages with ERA

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Tags: discovery, ERA, first person, rankings, winter-2011

The strength and depth of UQ research has been highlighted by the landmark ERA exercise

By Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alan Lawson

Discovery has always been an integral feature of Australian universities, but from the late 1980s a new emphasis was placed on the quantity and quality of research outputs.

Universities and governments developed programs to support research and research training, and by 2004 it became clear that massive increases in the amount of research carried out in Australia needed to be comprehensively evaluated.

In 1999, The University of Queensland made a submission to the Federal Government arguing for regular assessments of Australian research quality.

After long consultation, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) was established to evaluate quality using a large number of measures.

Why are we doing this?

The Government needs to assure itself and the public that investment in research is well spent. Prospective students have a right to know whether universities’ claims about their quality can be validated.Researchers and research students deciding where to work or study need robust data on where the best research is being done.

Universities need to measure the success of their research strategies and investments and to determine where new strengths can be built.

Fundamentally, it’s been a way to test reputations.

ERA will eventually redirect some funding to Australian universities, but UQ believes its key value is to our reputation as a leading research university engaged in high quality research across many different disciplines.

UQ’s Strategic Plan states our ambition to be ranked in the top two universities in Australia, and reaffirms our strategy of building human and physical infrastructure for collaborative, interdisciplinary research.

More than 100 professional and academic staff devoted their time to ensure the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the huge datasets required. We captured more than 30,000 research outputs, 150 patents, 550 esteem measures, and $860 million of research and commercialisation income in our final submission.

UQ received the second highest number of the two top ratings – just behind the University of Melbourne, but well ahead of the rest.

We were also delighted by the breadth of excellence ERA has revealed right across the University.

As well as 28 specialised fields of research in which UQ research was rated well above world standard (listed left), we were the highest-ranked Australian university in another 13: education systems, curriculum and pedagogy, human geography, social work, architecture, urban and regional planning, religious studies, anthropology, chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, veterinary science, food science, and physiology.

Our own analysis highlights how important collaborative and interdisciplinary work was to achieving these excellent results.

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