The Australian’s Research magazine takes a deep dive into research

Not for many decades has the value of research been so clear. Less than two years after the appearance of a new and dangerous virus, and thanks to countless researchers in infectious disease, immunology, epidemiology and other fields, we now have many effective vaccines in mass production, and numerous tests and treatments for Covid-19.

In The Australian’s annual Research magazine, we acknowledge the talent and dedication of our researchers. And again, as we have for the previous four years, we present The List – a roll call of the best researchers and the best research institutions in Australia in 250 individual fields of research.

We do this by teaming with talent discovery and research analytics firm League of Scholars to comprehensively scan online data about Australia’s research output. It enables us to identify the best researcher and the best research institution in each field, based on the excellence of their research and the impact it has in discovery and scholarship.

This is a unique listing. Because it zeros in on the particular specialties of individual researchers and research institutions, it provides fine-grained detail and recognises countless areas of excellence which would otherwise go unnoticed in the public arena.

One thing we learn is that most, but not all, of the best Australian research institutions, are universities. For example, the CSIRO is the top research institution in 10 scientific fields and hospitals host the best research in some medical fields.

The 250 fields of research are divided into eight major discipline areas. In the magazine you will find listings of Australia’s best researcher and research institution for all of the fields, classified by their discipline area. We also bring you stories of some of our top researchers, who explain why their work is important and the impact it has in the community.

But there’s more. Not only do the data scans carried out by League of Scholars enable us to identify the best research in Australia, we can also identify the world’s best. And by cross-checking against the Australian data we discover that in 15 fields an Australian-based researcher is first in the world and in 20 fields it is an Australian research institution that is world’s best. Being able to claim 20 global firsts in 250 research fields is a testament to the quality of research in Australia.

Looking for merit field by field is one way to identify the best in Australian research. Another way, which we also use, is to look more broadly at the researchers who, regardless of their field, have demonstrated consistently high achievement over their career. We do this by identifying 40 lifetime achievers who are Australia’s “superstars of research”. We also name 40 up-and-coming researchers who, in the first years of their career, show huge promise for the future. We list these early career achievers as the “rising stars of research”.

This is the fourth year we have used League of Scholars data to paint a detailed picture of Australian research and, each year, we look for new ways to analyse this trove of information.

This year we look specifically at Australian research journals, which are often overlooked when research is analysed from a global perspective. But papers in Australian journals are particularly important because of the research they publish on topics of importance to Australia.

We also again examine Australian academic books and build a top 10 list of books published in the past year.

Finally there is another area, entrepreneurship, which we explore for the first time using a set of data from Crunchbase.

We’ve identified which universities have produced the most start-up founders an area of immense interest as the federal government works on policies to encourage commercialisation of university research.

We hope you will enjoy this deep dive into the data on Australian research.

Tim Dodd is Higher Education Editor of The Australian. Paul McCarthy is CEO of League of Scholars.

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