Benchmarking Academic Research Output in Australia

In higher education the uptake of benchmarking has been slow, despite its recognition elsewhere as an important tool in the pursuit of continuous quality improvement. The need for national benchmarks of research productivity and quality will be felt intensely in Australia in 1995 as the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education focuses on research evaluation. This paper presents benchmarks for publications productivity for Australian academic researchers based on an empirical study of all reported publications output from the Australian university system in 1991. ‘Publications productivity’ in this paper is defined as the number of publications per 10 equivalent academic staff members. Benchmarks for aggregate publications output per staff member, and for each of 13 types of publications, are reported for the highest performing institution, and highest performing organisational units within any institution. Applicability within Australian higher education of citation impact indices as an indicator of research quality is discussed.