President’s Column, May 2010
Tue, May 18 2010

Last month I mentioned the issues atmospheric scientists in academia are having with the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative. This initiative aims to rank all disciplines at Australian universities relative to world-best practice in research, and against other Australian universities. One tool that will be used to assess the quality of research will be a citation analysis focussed on high-quality journals. I mentioned that the highly respected Monthly Weather Review has been omitted from the ERA list of ranked journals. This was apparently because the Australian Research Council, which is carrying out the ERA for the Federal Government, was advised by a peak discipline group representing geologists (and not atmospheric scientists) that MWR was not peer-reviewed.  On behalf of AMOS, I pointed out that the advice to the ARC was incorrect, and asked that MWR be included in the ERA ranked list since its omission would seriously bias the ERA results and prejudice those universities where atmospheric scientists publish in this journal. We have been unsuccessful in our attempts to get the ERA journal list corrected.

An even more serious problem has emerged. Many atmospheric scientists and oceanographers publish in the highly respected and cited Geophysical Research Letters and the Journal of Geophysical Research. However, the ERA will not allow papers published in GRL and JGR to be counted as atmospheric sciences or oceanography research. Worse, such papers (even those on meteorology) will be counted as research output of geophysics schools (ie geologists), artificially inflating their productivity while artificially decreasing the productivity of atmospheric sciences and oceanography. So, papers that I have published in these journals will be counted as an output of Monash University, but will be attributed to the geologists at this university, rather than atmospheric scientists.  

Again, we have pointed out this error to the ARC, but they remain unwilling to correct the journal list. Unless the ARC corrects the list of journals and aligns the journals with the correct fields of research, then any ERA-based assessment of atmospheric sciences and oceanography in Australian universities will be worse than useless. It will be biased against some universities (compared with other universities where academics do not publish in MWR) and the overall productivity of the Australian atmospheric and oceanographic research sectors will be biased low (because they cannot count papers in GRL and JGR).

Neville Nicholls
May 2010