Wednesday, March 2, 2011

How Does CSIRO Compare to Australian Universities?


The Australian government recently released the ERA Report, which compared research at Australian universities to the rest of the world. But this report does not evaluate the performance of CSIRO Australia's system of natural laboratories.

An article by Robin Batterham in the Australian Universities Review does evaluate CSIRO's performance relative to the top Australian universities and the rest of the world. Based on the number of citations in the Web of Science, Batterham finds that the top ten Australian research institutions are the Group of Eight universities, University of Newcastle, and CSIRO.

Overall, he finds that CSIRO is the 7th ranked Australian research institution. Melbourne is top and ANU 5th (This is based on total citations and ANU is smaller than other Go8 universities). Rankings in individual fields vary a lot. CSIRO is the top Australian institution in plant and animal science, environment/ecology, and agricultural sciences. It is bottom among the top ten in clinical medicine, social science, biology and biochemistry, computer science, and space science. Not every institution is featured in each discipline ranking. In social science, CSIRO ranks near the bottom globally.

ANU is top in Australia in geosciences, mathematics, space science, and physics according to this ranking.

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