3 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) This section provides an overview of ERA and issues raised in previous feedback from stakeholders. It includes questions relating to policy, methodology and process.
For further information about ERA, please visit the ERA homepage on the ARC website.
3.1 ERA overview
ERA is a national evaluation framework that evaluates the quality of Australian university research against international benchmarks. In doing so, ERA aims to identify and promote excellence across the full spectrum of research activity, including both discovery and applied research, within Australian universities.
The specific objectives of ERA are to:
1. continue to develop and maintain an evaluation framework that gives government, industry, business and the wider community assurance of the excellence of research conducted in Australian higher education institutions 5 2. provide a national stocktake of discipline level areas of research strength and areas where there is opportunity for development in Australian higher education institutions
3. identify excellence across the full spectrum of research performance
4. identify emerging research areas and opportunities for further development
5. allow for comparisons of research in Australia, nationally and internationally, for all discipline areas. ERA is a comprehensive collection of university data that includes all eligible researchers and their research outputs. It evaluates the quality of research at each university at the broad and specific discipline level. 6 This enables recognition of excellence regardless of the size or specialisation of a university. At the conclusion of each ERA round, the ARC publishes a national report. The State of Australian University Research 2018–19: ERA National Report presents the outcomes of the most recent round, ERA 2018, and is available via the ARC Data Portal. With four rounds now complete, ERA provides a wealth of fine-grained, sector-wide and discipline- specific data and analyses of Australian university research not available from other sources. This includes performance ratings since ERA 2010, extensive research staffing data (including gender), all Australian university research outputs from 2003 to 2016, and research income and research application data from 2006 to 2016. Information from ERA is used by Government, universities, and other stakeholders for a variety of purposes. While some of this information is available publicly or through commercial providers, it is generally not available by discipline, or does not sufficiently cover all disciplines.
5 In this document, institutions are generally referred to as universities except where ‘institution’ is used in a pre-existing definition. When the terms ‘institution’ or ‘university’ are used, the term is referring to Australian higher education providers as defined by the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (Tables A and B) 6 In ERA, the broad discipline refers to the ANZSRC two-digit Field of Research or Division. Specific discipline refers to the ANZSRC four-digit Field of Research or group.
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