In displays of admirable restraint vice chancellors and research lobbies are selflessly pointing to their organisations’ reputations as reason to receive a big share of the funding expected to be in the budget

But working how to rate research reps isn’t easy. Xin Gu and Karen Blackmore (Uni Newcastle) demonstrated why in a 2017 analysis of science research performance over time of three un-named Australian universities, which could be a sandstone, a pre-Dawkins and a regional

They found research output across the three converged and that increased publication rates were not accompanied by a decline in the status of the journals where people published. However, publications by people at the elite institution did have higher citation counts.