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Publish or perish


Journals

Journals have varied status in the world of science - but not when it comes to science funding in Australia.

The current system in Australia of rewarding universities for publication regardless of the journal's standing is flawed, argues an Australian academic.

In 1995, the decision was made to allocate government funding, in part, on the basis of a research group's output of published material. So quantity, not quality would be rewarded, with no consideration given to the calibre of the journal in which any given paper appeared.

"It's detrimental because it's not measuring what it should," said Ms Linda Butler, head of the Research Evaluation and Policy Project, at the Australian National University. She wrote the Correspondence to this week's Nature.

A large chunk of government funding supporting the research activities of Australian Universities is allocated on the basis of formulas that rely on three elements – research income, the number of PhD students and the number of publications.

Ms Butler's group used the Institute for Scientific Information's Science Citation Index to analyse the quality of Australian publications. The index counts the number of times a paper refers to (or cites) another paper. If a paper is ground breaking and high quality, it will have a high citation count. On the other hand, if it is a pedestrian paper in a insignificant journal, it may have no citations.

The number of publications jumped after the 1995 decision. But the quality was not uniform. While the number of publications in the bottom quartile (less prestigious) of journals doubled, the number in the third quartile increased by 50 per cent. In the top two quartiles, it only increased by 20 per cent.

During the government's 1999 West Review of Higher Education, there was an attempt by the review committee to remove the number of publications component. "But the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee lobbied to keep it in," said Ms Butler. "For smaller regional and metropolitan universities, it is easier to improve funding levels via this method."

In other words, it is easier to increase the number of publications than attract more PhD students or increase the amount of external funding. In smaller universities, the proportion of money that comes from government sources is much higher.

"The nominal amount is 10 per cent," said Ms Butler. "But smaller universities can have up to 25 per cent of their funding coming from this source. It is more important to them than it is to research universities."

Ms Butler's group has received a grant to assess different performance criteria that could be used. They will only analyse journal articles.

They will also investigate alternatives to the current system such as placing journals into categories depending on their scientific standing.

"It is not a simple matter because local journals are not included in the ISI," said Ms Butler.

This would be a problem for people who specialise in Australian or Asian studies and therefore publish locally.

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