How we chose the 15 Australian unis moving fastest in research

We used data to discover the 15 ‘fast moving’ Australian universities, those which have expanded their research influence the most in the past year.

We name the 15 “fast moving” universities which expanded their research influence the most in the past year.

In the 2025 Research magazine we name the “fastest movers”, the 15 Australian universities whose research grew fastest in the past year.

It is a varied list ranging from two of Australia’s largest universities – Sydney and Monash – to some of the smallest such as Charles Darwin, CQUniversity and Bond, a private institution.

It also includes Deakin, Edith Cowan, the University of South Australia, La Trobe, UNSW, RMIT, Griffith, UTS, Queensland and Newcastle.

What these universities have in common is they increased their research influence by more than 5 per cent in the past year.

The Australian’s partner, talent discovery and research analytics firm League of Scholars, calculated the increase in research influence by looking at the annual improvement in research volume and impact.

For each university, an individual H-index was calculated for all researchers in the university based on their work in the five years to 2024. The same was done for all researchers in the university for the five years to 2023.

The median of each of these sets of data was found and the 2024 median was compared to the 2023 median to calculate growth.

The fact that we measured growth, rather than the amount of research output, gave smaller institutions a chance to be recognised for what they are doing to improve their research and make it valuable to industry and their local communities.

Follow the links above to see how leaders from all 15 “fast-moving” universities have gone about expanding research at their institution.