Flinders University’s ratings in the 2010 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) report confirm its strength in medical research, an area traditionally very strong in Australia, with rankings above or well above world standard.
Other fields at Flinders with rankings considerably above both world and national averages include criminology, the performing arts and creative writing.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor David Day said medical research, law and performing arts have been continuous and long-term research strengths for the University, receiving targeted research investment.
“We are delighted this has been recognised through the ERA initiative,” Professor Day said.
“More than half of the disciplines assessed at Flinders were ranked at world standard or above, confirming our status as a research intensive university,” he said.
“We will be working hard to improve those areas further.”
PICTURED: Professor John Miners, Head of Clinical Pharmacology at Flinders University
This sounds really good news however it does not fit with the article in the Australian where Flinders ranks 24th with none of our research areas rising above average.
Are we talking about the same research?
I did not see any groundbreaking research or research opportunities at Flinders while I studied there. Flinders has got lot of things to improve on its side. Adelaide Uni has better scholarships and collaborations as far as I have seen. Thar is why they are 74th ranking Uni in the world. Flinders is somewhere down!! Best luck for Flinders to catch up. All the best.
Of the 7 main categories, Flinders ranked below world average in 4 and “insufficent” research in 1. We now rank 24th out of 41 unis and below UniSA. How is that a good result in any way?
I think it’s fantastic that Australia is highly ranked with Medical research. Hopefully medical research will continue to copy the opensource model of IT professionals and work together globally for cures.
Does Flinders also concur with that approach to research?
The ranking of 24th out of 41 Uni’s is a very simplistic view of the ERA outcomes and does not give a fair indication of the research performance at Flinders. If you (more appropriately) compare institutions within specific areas of research the results look very different. Looking at just the Medical and Health Sciences for example, which is where Flinders’ has greatest research strength, our relative ranking improves significantly (by my calculations to about 12th). Also, the ranking scores shown by The Australia are rounded up to whole numbers, so 2.5 and 3.4 both become 3. As often the press have used an over-simplistic view to paint a misleading picture. Get the report and analyse the details yourself.
Excluding medicine and chemical sciences, it is clear that Flinders has not done very well; this is evident in the other 5 categories and is regardless of The Australian’s averaging. The rounding to whole numbers is in fact even more questionable: the qualitative difference implied between 2.5 and 3.4 is very huge; why not consider 2.4 (not very different from 2.5) and 3.5 (not very different from 3.4) and round to 2 and 4?
It seems that the ERA ranking also does comply with the QS World University Rankings 2010 for Life Science & Biomedicine subject categories (http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2010/subject-rankings/life-science-biomedicine) where Flinders placed at 160 th globally.
The results for Flinders are actually quite mixed and it is not easy to draw one simple conclusion. Those results can be found here http://www.arc.gov.au/era/outcomes_2010/Institution/FLN