Articles
RSS SubscribeFriday 20th November 2009
A comparison of Australian and European Union research performance profiles
by FEAST, REPP, DIISR
Governments worldwide face the challenge of how best to prioritise their international science and innovation (S&I) cooperation activities. This involves balancing the intrinsic benefits that may arise from international S&I cooperation with extrinsic considerations — diplomacy, trade, national security etc.
The interplay of these intrinsic and extrinsic considerations means that complex and often ambiguous tradeoffs need to be addressed by policymakers. In some cases international S&I cooperation priorities will reflect extrinsic diplomatic and geopolitical goals. In other cases the objectives will relate more closely to balancing the costs, risks and benefits of particular bilateral and multilateral S&I cooperation opportunities.
Given the limited financial resources available to support international S&I cooperation it is useful for policymakers to have access to appropriate decision-support tools and information. This should help to avoid wasteful resource allocations caused by a lack of access to relevant information.
This paper seeks to contribute to the evolving policy framework in this area by considering ways of characterising and mapping international imbalances in research performance.
The focus is upon bilateral imbalances in research performance, as expressed in relative citation performance for journal articles indexed by Thomson-Reuters publications and citations datasets (formerly known as the Institute for Scientific Information, or ISI).
To this end the paper:
- proposes a simple policy-oriented framework for understanding the potential pay-offs and risks associated with international S&I cooperation; and
- provides an illustration of the application of this framework by populating it with bibliometric data on bilateral imbalances in S&I capability as measured by Relative Citation Impact.
