Australia is not maximising the return on its research investment

Abstract

Australia is losing about $425 million dollars worth of potential return on its public investment in research every year. The Australian Research Councils spend about $1 billion dollars yearly, which generate about 32,000 research journal articles. But it is not the number of articles published that reflects the return on Australia's research investment: A piece of research, if it is worth funding and doing at all, must not only be published, but used, applied and built-upon by other researchers. This is called 'research impact' and a measure of it is the number of times an article is cited by other articles ('citation impact').