Innovation Minister, Senator Carr has announced improvements to the next round of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative in a statement to Estimates Hearing of the Senate Economics Committee.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) will use a refined journal quality indicator for ERA 2012. Evaluation committees will assess the appropriateness of the journals used as publication outlets for research, taking into account any regional or applied focus of the disciplinary unit concerned. For this purpose, evaluation committees will be presented with a profile of the journals (or other relevant publications) used most frequently by the unit under evaluation.
As a consequence of this change, journals will no longer be assigned a prescriptive rank. However, the ARC will continue to maintain a list of eligible journals and their relevant classification codes to support benchmark metrics.
ERA 2012 will also better capture multidisciplinary research. Articles with significant content from a discipline will be able to be assigned to that discipline regardless of where the article is published. For instance, an article on ethics in a medical journal could be assigned to ethics, even if the journal was coded to a medical discipline.
The ARC will also strengthen peer review and extend the capture of applied research activity for the ERA 2012 evaluation.
The ARC received strong feedback that changes to ERA methodology should be minimised to ensure consistency. These changes ensure that ERA evaluations will continue to be informed by a broad range of indicators covering research quality, research volume and activity, research application and research recognition.
The ARC will release the draft submission guidelines for ERA 2012 to provide opportunity to comment on the proposed changes.
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