Research Quality

Recently we held a joint meeting of some of the Principal Scientific Advisors (Profs Rod Keenan, Drew Dawson, and Douglas Paton) and the Board’s Research and Education Committee (Ewan Waller, Murray Dudfield and Prof Alistar Robertson) to discuss the concept of research quality. We discussed what constitutes research quality and how it can be measured, in the context of a CRC and particularly at the early stages of a research program. There are many lagging indicators, H-index, citations, etc.; but very few lead indicators. The group discussed this and came up with few ideas based around the quality of the research teams, on the basis that, if they have done good work before then it is a fair assumption they will continue to do so in the future.  It is important to the CRC though that we are also seen to be developing new researchers, so having a mix of researchers is important.

However, the concept of research impact measures is a much more vexed one which has yet to be determined in a national sense and will continue to be debated by us and others.

Just for the record my initial evaluations based upon H-index scores for most of our key researchers would put us largely on par with most of our international peer researchers, which is a good sign

I am happy to hear from anyone who has thoughts on which measures are important to an organisation such as a User focussed research organisation such as ours.