Field by field, how competitive is Australia’s research?

We use a measure based on the economic concept of revealed comparative advantage to find Australia’s research strengths and weaknesses relative to the rest of the world.

How good is Australia’s research compared to the rest of the world?

How good is Australia’s research compared to the world? To find an answer we’ve looked at Australia’s research impact in the 250 fields examined in the 2024 Research Magazine and compared them to the world as a whole.

The graphs show the 15 fields in which Australia is strongest compared to the world and the 15 fields in which we are weakest. Fields which score greater than 1 are stronger than the world norm. Fields with scores less than 1 are weaker.

Higher education research is the area in which we lead the world by largest margin, closely followed by nursing, mining & mineral resources, and then Asian studies & history. The strength of nursing is significant because it is a large field in which research is highly important. Australia’s world-leading mining industry is closely linked to research and so Australia’s high performance there is not a surprise. And given our proximity to Asia, the strength of Asian studies is gratifying.

More concerning is the evidence of Australia’s weakness in hard science areas such as plasma & fusion, spectroscopy & molecular physics, high energy & nuclear physics, and ceramic engineering.

Research strengths include Nursing, Mining & Mineral Resources, and Reproductive Health

Research weaknesses include Economics, Mathematical Physics and Political Science

How the scores are calculated

We use a method based on the economic concept of revealed comparative advantage, which has the advantage of adjusting for country size. To explain it by example, consider nursing. We take the impact score for Australia’s nursing research and divide it by the impact score for all of Australia’s research, This tells us the contribution which nursing makes to Australia’s total research strength. We do the same for nursing research globally, which tells us the contribution of nursing to the world’s research strength. Then we divide the first by the second. If less than 1 then Australia is under par in nursing compared to the world. If greater than 1 then Australia is over par in nursing. In fact, Australia is far stronger than the world in nursing, with a score of 4.37.