Oz science

[AstralTraveller (David)]

There are organisations out there that monitor the performance of various areas of academic research. The latest data from Thomson-Reuters summarises the Australian research effort (at least according to Thomson's measures). The data report Australia's world share of science and social-science papers over the last five years, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 22 fields in the Thomson Reuters database. Also, Australia's relative citation impact compared to the world average in each field, in percentage terms. The citation impact attempts to measure how useful other researchers have found a particular piece of work.

We can see that Australia does very well in space science, physics, ecology, medicine and especially geoscience. On the other hand computer science is dragging the chain and we are hopeless at economics and business.

The original article can be found at.

http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/08/aug24-08_1/

[Ric]

Good to see the Geosciences taking a predominant role.

That's probably a bit bias of me having studied and worked as an exploration geologist.