Wrapping up ARC DP12 Project

I just submitted the final report for this funded project which has been running since 2012 to the research office. We achieved most of the project goals despite receiving much less funding than requested. I also had to take on the role of research director for the Crawford School for 2 years of the project, which took up quite a lot of my time.

On the other hand, one of the main papers is still not quite complete and another is in the revise and resubmit stage. We haven't yet put out working papers for either of those papers either. So, the reduced funding and added admin work did slow things down. So far we have published the following papers that credit the ARC for funding:

Lu Y. and D. I. Stern (in press) Substitutability and the cost of climate mitigation policy, Environmental and Resource Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Csereklyei Z., M. d. M. Rubio Varas, and D. I. Stern (2016) Energy and economic growth: The stylized facts, Energy Journal 37(2), 223-255. Blogpost

Kander A. and D. I. Stern (2014) Economic growth and the transition from traditional to modern energy in Sweden, Energy Economics 46, 56-65. Working Paper Version | Audioslides | Blogpost

Bruns S. B., C. Gross, and D. I. Stern (2014) Is there really Granger causality between energy use and output? Energy Journal 35(4), 101-134. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. and K. Enflo (2013) Causality between energy and output in the long-run, Energy Economics 39, 135-146. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

As we are still completing what I think is the most important paper of the project, on the industrial revolution in Britain, this story is definitely not complete yet. In retrospect, I probably should have asked for an extension of the project at the end of last year, so that we could put in a more complete final report to the ARC next year, rather than this year.

Discovery Projects 2016

We - myself together with Stephan Bruns and Alessio Moneta - got an ARC Discovery Projects grant. Thanks also to Zsuzsanna Csereklyei who contributed to the development of the proposal and who we may hire as a post-doc using the grant - depending if she wants to come to Australia for the time we will be able to afford to fund with the money we received ($A273k - 65% of what we requested). This is my second ARC grant following the DP12 grant that we got a few years ago. The title of our project is: "Energy Efficiency Innovation, Diffusion and the Rebound Effect". We will be looking at the diffusion of energy efficiency innovations and trying to measure the economy-wide rebound effect empirically. This was our second attempt at applying for a grant on this topic. Last time around we were rated in the top 10% of unfunded proposals and so I thought it was worthwhile revising and resubmitting!

Other good news today is that my colleague, Paul Burke got a DECRA grant. I think this is our fourth DECRA at Crawford. Congratulations to Paul! Also Peter MacDonald and Robert Sparrow got a DP16 grant. Congratulations to Robert and Peter!

Research Assessment Using Early Citation Information

A new paper with Stephan Bruns on carrying out research assessment like the UK REF and the Australian ERA using citations data rather than peer review. We did a lot of the work of processing the data (doing fancy things with R and manually checking names of universities in Excel) when I visited Stephan in Kassel in November.

The problem with research assessment as carried out in Britain and in the social sciences in Australia is that publications that have already passed through a peer review process are again peer reviewed by the assessment panels. This involves a significant workload for many academics who are supposed to read these papers as well as the effort a each university put into selecting the publications that will be reviewed. However, this second peer review though is inferior to the first. If instead citation based metrics were used the whole process could be done much faster and cheaper. In Australia the natural sciences and psychology are assessed using citation analysis. I think this can be extended to at least some other social sciences including economics.

UK REF panels can also put some weight on citations data in some disciplines including most natural sciences and economics, but only as a positive indicator of academic significance and in very much a secondary role to peer review. This represents a change from the previous RAE, which prohibited the use of citations data by panels. This paper provides additional evidence on the potential effectiveness of citation analysis as a method of research assessment. We hope our results can inform the future development of assessment exercises such as the REF and ERA.

One reason why citations analysis is less accepted in the social sciences than in the natural sciences is the belief that citations accumulate too slowly in most social sciences such as economics to be useful for short-term research assessmen.

My 2014 paper in PLoS ONE shows that long-run citations to articles in economics and political science are fairly predictable from the first few years of citations to those articles. However, research assessment evaluates universities rather than single articles. In this new paper, we show that rank correlations are greatly increased when we aggregate over the economics publications of a university and also when we aggregate publications over time. The rank correlation for UK universities for citations received till the end of 2004 (2005) by economics articles published in 2003 and 2004 with total citations to those articles received through 2014 is 0.91 (0.97). These are high correlations. Correlations for Australia are a bit lower.

Our results here show that at the department or university level citations definitely accumulate fast enough in economics in order to be able to predict longer run citation outcomes of recent publications. It's not true that citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used in research assessment.

On the other hand, the rank correlation between our early citations indicators and the outcome of research assessment exercises in the UK and Australia ranges from 0.67-0.76. These results suggest that citation analysis is useful for research assessment in economics if the assessor is willing to use cumulative citations as a measure of research strength, though there do appear to be some systematic differences between peer-review based research assessment and our citation analysis, especially in the UK. Part of the difference will emerge due to the differences between the sample of publications we selected to assess and the publications actually selected in the 2010 ERA and 2008 RAE.

How Has Research Assessment Changed the Structure of Academia?

Does measuring something change it?  In quantum mechanics measurement disturbs what is being measured, which is referred to as the observer effect. The same is often true in social systems, especially of course when measurement is attached to rewards. The UK and Australia have been conducting periodical research assessment exercises - the REF and ERA. In the case of the UK, research assessment started almost three decades ago. In Australia, the first research assessment was only conducted in 2010 but the founding of the ARC in 1988 and its independence in 2001 are both milestones in the road to increased emphasis on competition in research in Australia.

Johnston et al. (2014) show that the total number of economics students has increased in UK more rapidly than the total number of all students, but the number of departments offering economics degrees has declined, particularly in post-1992 universities. Also, the number of universities submitting to the REF under economics has declined sharply with only 3 post-1992 universities submitting in the latest round. This suggests that the REF has driven a concentration of economics research in the more elite universities in the UK. BTW the picture above is of the Hotel Russell, which the Russell Group of British universities is named after.

Neri and Rodgers (2014) investigate whether the increased emphasis on research in Australia has had the desired effect in the field of economics. They investigate the output of top economics research by Australian academics from 2001 to 2010. By constructing a unique database of 26,219 publications in 45 top journals, they compare Australia’s output internationally, determine whether Australia’s output increased, and rank Australian universities based on their output. They find that Australia’s output, in absolute and relative terms, and controlling for differences in page size and journal quality, increased and, on a per capita basis, is converging to the levels of the most research-intensive countries. Finally, they find that the historical dominance of the top four universities is diminishing. The correlation between the number of top 45 journal articles published in 2005-2010 and the ERA 2012 ranking is 0.83 (0.78 for 2003-8 and ERA 2010).

References

Johnston, J., Reeves, A. and Talbot, S. (2014). ‘Has economics become an elite subject for elite UK universities?’ Oxford Review of Education, vol. 40(5), pp. 590-609.

Neri, F. and Rodgers, J. (2014). ‘The contribution of Australian academia to the world’s best economics research: 2001 to 2010’, Economic Record.

Peer Review vs. Citation Analysis in Research Assessment Exercises

Existing research finds strong correlations between the rankings produced by UK research assessment exercises (RAE) and bibliometric analyses for several specific humanities and social science disciplines (e.g. Colman et al., 1995; Oppenheim, 1996; Norris and Oppenheim, 2003) including economics (Süssmuth et al., 2006). Clerides et al. (2011) compare the 1996 and 2001 RAE ratings of economics departments with independent rankings from the academic literature. They find RAE ratings to be largely in agreement with the profession’s view of research quality as documented by independent rankings, although the latter appear to be more focused on research quality at the top end of academic achievement. This is because most rankings of departments in the economics literature are based on publications in top journals only, which lower ranked departments have very few of.

Mryglod et al. (2013) analyse the correlations between the values of Thomson Reuters Normalised Citation Impact (NCI) indicator and RAE 2008 peer-review scores in several academic disciplines, from the natural to social sciences and humanities. The NCI computes the normalized impact factor across a unit of assessment (an academic discipline at a given university) in the RAE based on only the publications actually submitted to the RAE. Mryglod et al. (2013) compute both average (or quality) and total (or strength) values (average multiplied by number of staff submitted to the RAE) of these two indicators for each institution. They find very high correlations for the strength indicators for some disciplines and poor correlations at for the quality indicators for all disciplines. This means that, although the citation-based scores could help to describe institution level strength (which is quality times size), in particular for the so-called hard sciences, they should not be used as a proxy for ranking or comparison of research groups. Moreover, the correlation between peer-evaluated and citation-based scores is weaker for the “soft” sciences. Spearman rank correlation coefficients for their quality indicators range from 0.18 (mechanical engineering) to 0.62 (chemistry). However for strength the correlations range from 0.88 (history and sociology) to 0.97 (biology). This is because quality is correlated with size and so the two factors reinforce each other.

Mryglod et al. (2014) attempt to predict the 2008 RAE retrospectively and the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) before its results were released. They examined biology, chemistry, physics, and sociology. Of the indicators they trialled, they found that the departmental h-index had the best fit to the 2008 results. Departmental h-index is based on all publications published by a department in the time window assessed by the relevant assessment exercise. The rank correlation ranged from 0.83 in chemistry to 0.58 in sociology. They find that the correlation with the RAE for the immediate h-index is as good as the correlation in later years with the h-index of the same set of publications.

Bornmann and Leydesdorff (2014) argue that one of the downsides of bibliometrics as a research assessment instrument is that citations take time to accumulate while research assessment exercises are designed to assess recent performance:

“This disadvantage of bibliometrics is chiefly a problem with the evaluation of institutions where the research performance of recent years is generally assessed, about which bibliometrics—the measurement of impact based on citations—can say little…. the standard practice of using a citation window of only 3 years nevertheless seems to be too small.” (1230)

They argue further that bibliometrics:

“can be applied well in the natural sciences, but its application to TSH (technical and social sciences and humanities) is limited.” (1231)

But rather than assuming that peer review is the preferred approach to research assessment and citation analysis should only be used to reduce cost, we can ask whether the review conducted by research assessments such as the REF and the Australian ERA meets the normal academic standards for peer review. Research does show that peer review at journals has predictive validity for the citations that will be received by accepted papers compared to those received by rejected papers. However, evidence for the predictive validity of peer review of grant and fellowship applications is more mixed (Bornmann, 2011). Therefore, further research is warranted on the use of citation analysis to rank academic departments or universities in research assessment exercises. Sayer (2014) argues that the peer review undertaken in research assessment exercises does not meet normal standards for peer review. He compares university and national-level REF processes against actual practices of scholarly review as found in academic journals, university presses, and North American tenure procedures. He finds that the peer review process used by the REF falls far short of the level of scrutiny or accuracy of these more familiar peer review processes. The number of items each reviewer has to assess alone means that the review cannot be of the same quality as reviews for publication. And reviewers will have to assess much material outside their area of specific expertise. Sayer argues that though metrics may have problems, a process that gives such extraordinary gatekeeping power to individual panel members is far worse.

Given the large number of items that panels need to review they are likely to focus on the venue of publication and at least in business and economics handy mappings of journals to REF grades exist (Hudson, 2013). Regibeau and Rockett (2014) build imaginary economics departments entirely composed of Nobel Prize winners and evaluate them using standard journal rankings geared to the UK RAE. Performing the same evaluation on existing departments, they find that the rating of the Nobel Prize departments does not stand out from other good departments. Compared to recent research evaluations, the Nobel Prize departments’ rankings are less stable. This suggests a significant effect of score “targeting” induced by the rankings exercise. They find some evidence that modifying the assessment criteria to increase the total number of publications considered can help distinguish the top. But if departments composed entirely of Nobel Prize winners perform worse than current departments then it is hard to know what such assessment means.

Sgroi and Oswald (2013) examine how research assessment panels could most effectively use citation data to replace peer review. They suggest a Bayesian approach that uses prior information on where a item was published combined with observations on citations to derive a posterior distribution for the quality of the paper. We could then estimate, for example, what is the probability that a paper belongs in the 4* category given where it was published and the early citations it has received. Stern (2014) and Levitt and Thelwall (2011) show that the journal impact factor has strong explanatory power in the year of publication but that this declines very quickly as citations accumulate. So, this approach would be most useful for papers published in the last year or two before the assessment, but for earlier research outputs the added value over simply counting citations would be minimal.

References

Bornmann, L. (2011) ‘Scientific peer review’, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, vol. 45, pp. 199‐245.

Bornmann, L. and Leydesdorff, L. (2014). ‘Scientometrics in a changing research landscape’, EMBO Reports, vol. 15(12), pp. 1228–32.

Clerides, S., Pashardes, P. and Polycarpou, A. (2011) ‘Peer review vs metric-based assessment: testing for bias in the RAE ratings of UK economics departments’, Economica, vol. 78(311), pp. 565–83.

Colman, A. M., Dhillon, D. and Coulthard, B. (1995) ‘A bibliometric evaluation of the research performance of British university politics departments: Publications in leading journals’, Scientometrics vol. 32(1), pp. 49-66.

Hudson, J. (2013). ‘Ranking journals’, Economic Journal, vol. 123, pp. F202-22.

Levitt, J.M. and Thelwall, M. (2011). ‘A combined bibliometric indicator to predict article impact’, Information Processing and Management, vol. 47, pp. 300–8.

Mryglod, O., Kenna, R., Holovatch, Y. and Berche, B. (2013). ‘Comparison of a citation-based indicator and peer review for absolute and specific measures of research-group excellence’, Scientometrics, vol.97, pp. 767–77.

Mryglod, O., Kenna, R., Holovatch, Y. and Berche, B. (2014). Predicting Results of the Research Excellence Framework Using Departmental H-Index, arXiv:1411.1996v1.

Norris, M. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) ‘Citation counts and the research assessment exercise V: Archaeology and the 2001 RAE’, Journal of Documentation, vol. 59(6): pp. 709-30.

Oppenheim, C. (1996) ‘Do citations count? Citation indexing and the research assessment exercise’, Serials, vol. 9, pp. 155–61.

Regibeau, P. and Rockett, K.E. (2014). ‘A tale of two metrics: Research assessment vs. recognized excellence’, University of Essex, Department of Economics, Discussion Paper Series 757.

Sayer, D. (2014). Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF. Sage.

Sgroi, D. and Oswald, A.J. (2013). ‘How should peer-review panels behave?’ Economic Journal, vol. 123, pp. F255–78.

Stern, D.I. (2014). ‘High-ranked social science journal articles can be identified from early citation information’, PLoS ONE, vol. 9(11), art. e112520. 

Süssmuth, B., Steininger, M. and Ghio, S. (2006) 'Towards a European economics of economics: Monitoring a decade of top research and providing some explanation', Scientometrics, vol. 66(3), pp. 579-612.

Citation Prediction Story

We have put out a news story on my paper about predicting future citations.

High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information

I have posted a new bibliometric working paper , which investigates how well we can predict future cumulative citations from the first citations received by a paper in the disciplines of economics and political science.

It is usually assumed that citations accumulate too slowly in social sciences apart from psychology to be useful for short-term research assessment. For this reason, the Australian Government’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise, which attempts to assess the research quality of universities in the previous 5 years, uses peer review in social science disciplines apart from psychology for this reason but uses citation analysis for psychology and all natural sciences. This peer review process seems to me to be a wasteful duplication of effort to review research outputs that have already passed through a peer review process once.

I show that, surprisingly, citations received by journal articles in the social sciences in the first one to two years after publication are strongly predictive for citations received in future years. By contrast, I show that journal impact factors are mostly useful in the year of publication and their contribution to predicting citations declines rapidly thereafter.

If it is actually possible to predict citations fairly reliably in social science disciplines, then it should also be easy to predict them in the natural sciences. This means that it should be possible to expand bibliometric analysis in research evaluation exercises to all disciplines apart from the humanities and arts. It also means that we should pay attention to the early citations received by papers when we evaluate individual academics for hiring and promotion. Impact factors are reflective of journal selectivity, which we frequently do not have easily available data on. But they only explain about 16-17% of the variation in rankings of papers six years later conditional on the citations already received in the year of publication. The latter explain 13-14% of the variation. But at the end of the year following publication, accumulated citations explain 52-53% of the variation in cumulative citations after 6 years and 73% at the end of the second year after publication.

These models could be improved by adding information on the characteristics of the articles themselves and their authors, but that was much too time consuming to do for the almost 12,000 articles in my sample.

I have submitted a copy of my paper to the HEFCE inquiry on the use of metrics in research assessment.

John List to Take Up Fractional Appointment at Monash

A coup for Monash University -  John List to take up fractional appointment at Monash!

One motivation for this move would be the ERA. But the census date for ERA 2015 is 31 March 2014. Staff need to be affiliated at that date for their prior publications to be counted. Also the ARC is cracking down on institutions claiming the publications of affiliates. For those employed in less than a 0.4 fractional position, at least one publication must list the institution as an affiliation on the publication. As a reviewer for ERA 2012, I think some institutions really abused the system with their claims of affiliates' publications in ERA 2012. So, this move by Monash is either a long term plan, or has nothing to do with the ERA.

Draft ERA 2015 Submission Guidelines Released

This document provides a helpful list of changes from ERA 2012 to ERA 2015. The changes are minor. A good one, is a clampdown on abuse of affiliated researchers - some universities submitted a lot of publications by foreign-based researchers that they claimed as affiliates that did not include any mention of the university submitting the publication to ERA. So it looks like that for the moment the aim of measuring the broader impact of research as the UK REF is attempting to do has been shelved. At least as part of the ERA exercise.

ARC Discovery Projects 2015 Funding Rules Released

The ARC released the funding rules for the current grant round. A single document now also includes the rules for the DECRA, Laureate fellowships, and Discovery Indigenous Grants. A separate document reveals the specific changes to the Discovery program in this round compared to previous rounds. The most important changes, I think, are that :

• You can now apply for five years of funding rather than just three.
• There are no DORA fellowships for 2015!
• The limit on publication costs of 2% of non-salary part of the budget (which could be very little in many cases) is abolished and now you need to justify specifically the publication costs on the proposal.
• International Collaboration Awards are no longer awarded on a pro rata basis but up to $20k and up to 12 months.

The ARC has apparently not yet released the instructions for applicants.

Cuts to ARC Funding, Strategic Research Priorities

In yesterday's mid-year budget update, the Australian government announced cuts to ARC funding. $103 million will be cut over a 4 year period and diverted instead to medical research. This actually amounts to about 3% per year of the ARC budget. So, it's not as bad as one might think at first.

Back in June the government announced new Strategic Research Priorities to replace the previous National Research Priorities. I heard that these may be undergoing some revision. We'll only get new funding rules and instructions for all schemes in January. But I think we should assume that we will need to address these new priorities in ARC proposals to be submitted in the upcoming rounds at the beginning of 2014.

Evolution of the UK REF

Interesting article on how the UK's Research Excellence Framework evolved. An interesting comment is: "Per pound distributed, the RAE and REF are vastly cheaper than distributing the same sums via grant applications to the research councils" Very significant funding is tied to the results of the REF. By contrast, the Australian system is primarily driven by winning grants and then getting overheads based on them sent to institutions by the government a couple of years later with a smoothing process over time. PhD completions also feature strongly. So far, the ERA is only linked to a very small allocation of funding.

ARC Releases 2014 Schedule

The ARC has released its schedule of important dates for 2014. In the past, funding rules and application dates have only been released close to the actual dates and so it has been hard to plan grant submissions. This was especially the case in 2011 when they announced that the closing date for Future Fellowship applications would be several months earlier than expected. There were relatively few applications that year as a result. That benefitted applicants as the success rate was higher. But then this round there were far more applicants than usual and the success rate will halve from 30% to 16%. So, this is a good move from the ARC to make the whole grant application process a little saner.

ERA Verifies that Research Funding is Going to High Quality Research Groups

Yesterday I went to a presentation by the head of the Australian Research Council, Aidan Byrne. I asked him to comment on the article in the Australian that reported his thoughts that ERA results shouldn't be tied to larger amounts of funding. He said that ERA has already had significant effects without having money tied to it and the problem is that there aren't necessarily significant differences between being ranked a 3 or 4 or a 4 or 5 as scores are rounded up or down to produce the final outcomes. He said that the most valuable use of ERA is to verify that research funding is going to high quality research groups. There is a dramatic difference between the funding received by disciplines at institutions ranked 1 and 2 and those ranked 3,4, and 5 with a smaller difference between the latter three categories. Clearly the vast majority of funding is going to the groups ranked at world standard or above. It would help get this message across if ARC presented funding numbers per full-time-equivalent faculty member in each quality ranking. But they want to avoid doing productivity measures for some reason. The ARC slides I saw just show total dollars for all 5's, all 4's, and all 3's without adjusting for number of institutions or individual researchers. As there are usually fewer institutions ranked 5 this downplays the relationship between quality and funding. Also, it would make sense to then leave funding out as one of the indicators used to assess quality. And none of this information is in the ERA report. I think that would be valuable.

Australian Research Assessment Not Heading in UK Direction

That's the message I get from this interview with the head of the ARC, Aidan Byrne (formerly a science dean at ANU) in the Australian. The assumption of many in the sector, myself included is that the Australian research assessment exercise, ERA, and the funding attached to it would evolve in a way that generally followed UK practice with something of a time lag. In the UK, much more money is tied to the REF, the funding ratio associated with the three highest rankings of departments is 9:3:1, and case studies are being used very heavily to assess broader impact. Prof. Byrne argues that case studies should be used sparingly if at all to measure impact, not much money should be tied to ERA outcomes, and the funding ratio should be flatter. On Wednesday, I saw a presentation by Tim Cahill of the ARC on the ERA 2012 process and outcomes. One key finding was that for the citation based disciplines (most STEM disciplines (but not math or computer science) and psychology) there is a weak correlation between the ERA ranks assigned to universities and their citation performance relative to the benchmarks. A lot of subjectivity still seems to come into the ranking by the ERA committees. As they only count the number of citations per paper and not where they were cited, I guess that makes sense. So should Australian universities pay as much attention to ERA as they have been doing? For example, ANU has tied indicators in it strategic plan to the number of disciplines that achieve given ERA rankings by 2020. If I was the minister and looking for budget cuts would I want to continue with ERA on this basis?

Strength of the Go8

The Group of Eight are Australia's equivalent to the US R1 (or RU/VH in current terminology) universities. They are a self-nominating group but their research performance does stand out relative to the rest of the sector as shown in this graphic:

The Group of Eight are listed in the first eight columns and the other universities in the remaining ones. Each coloured square indicates a discipline at a university which was rated 4 or 5 (i.e. above world standard) in ERA 2012. The divide between the Go8 and the other universities is clearer in the social sciences and humanities fields such as economics (only one other university has a 4 or 5), business (none).

A similar pattern exists for research funding.

Average Number of Authors by Discipline

There is lots of interesting information in the ERA 2012 report. One item of interest to an audience beyond Australia is the average number of authors per publication:

I was surprised that astronomy was highest rather than physics. But I guess not all physics involves particle accelerators :)

ANU Gets a 5 in Economics

The ERA 2012 results are out this morning. ANU got a 5 in economics compared to a 4 in ERA 2010. We got a 5 in econometrics and 4 in applied economics and economic theory. The econometrics score is improved on last time too and I predicted that we would get a 5 in econometrics though I didn't see us improving our overall score for economics. However, the ARC evaluate two digit fields like economics (14) separately from 4 digit fields like applied economics (1402). Different outside reviewers receive a different sample of publications to evaluate. The two digit score is not a weighted mean of the four digit scores.

Melbourne got three 5's and a 4 in applied econ (nobody submitted anything in 1499 "other economics" this time). Monash got a 5 for 14 and econometrics (1403) and a 4 for 1402 and didn't submit in economic theory (1401). UTS got three 5's - it also didn't submit in 1401. UQ got  5 in 1401 and 4's otherwise. That's it for the 5's. Full details are in the table below. Click on it to enlarge.

In other major disciplines of interest to the Crawford School we got a 5 in political science, 3 in policy and administration, 5 in environmental science and management, and 5 in anthropology.

ARC Funding Freeze

There has been a lot of uncertainty recently about what is happening with research funding in Australia. There have been no announcements on when the next application rounds will open and around now the results of the ARC Discovery grant applications from earlier this year for funding next year should have been announced. The federal government has promised to deliver a budget surplus and was rumoured to be looking at cutting anything they could to achieve the goal. We got some information yesterday at a Senate hearing, where the ARC CEO - former ANU Dean of Science Aiden Byrne - and the minister both were questioned. We were told that there has been a funding freeze in place since August. It looks like that we might have more certainty after MYEFO or "minibudget", which will be released on Monday. But it also looks like that not as much funding will be available in the near future as there has been in the recent past.

ARC Laureate Fellowships Announced

The ARC announced the award of this year's round of Laureate Fellowships. The Laureate Fellowships - previously called 'Federation Fellowships" are the most prestigious grants offered by the ARC they provide a salary top up for the fellow, post-doc positions, and project funds for five years.

ANU won 4 out of the 17 Laureate Fellows announced and the College of Asia and the Pacific got two of these. The other two ANU awards went to my former Fenner School colleague David Lindenmayer and Eelco Rohling who is a climatologist at University of Southampton who will move to the ANU.

Elsewhere, there are several awards for coral reef science and John Quiggin's fellowship was renewed a second time. His proposed research will examine how financial regulation can be improved to reduce the vulnerability of the financial system and the macroeconomy to unforeseen shocks. His previous Federation Fellowship was focused on adaptation to climate change in the Murray Darling Basin.

James Cook university won two fellowships. Apart from that all the awards went to the Go8.

Congratulations to all the recipients!