There is now a community-service measure of research performance

The Australian Research Council’s long awaited engagement and impact results will be out this morning. Universities received their individual data late yesterday.

The ARC calls the findings, “a new rich national dataset” and they certainly provide entirely different insights to the research citation-based Excellence in Research for Australia, announced this week.

The EI exercise uses data and case studies submitted by universities and assessed by expert panels.

On the community impact measure, the ARC reports 43 per cent of 637 studies were rated “high”.

Some 25 per cent of examples of universities supporting the translation of research into impact were rated high.

Universities were found to have high ratings in the way they engaged with end-users of their research in 34 per cent of submissions.

This is a study well designed to serve Education Minister Dan Tehan’s focus on research that serves a utilitarian sense of the national interest.

“The transparent reporting of university performance will encourage universities to focus on working with industry and other stakeholders on research projects that deliver real results for real people,” he says.

There are complete results for a sample of discipline categories at the end of this morning’s issue (apologies for any errors).