In an uncertain environment, foster excellence in research

Flinders University, where I was all working as academics at the archaeology division, had in May 2015 planned to establish minimum thresholds of staff for papers published and income from grants. These plans were published in our academic union and reported in the local press.

Senior management at the university was based in Adelaide and began paying more attention to a federal program called Excellence in Research Australia. This program, which was established in 2010, conducted evaluations that aimed at improving the quality of research nationwide. The first round of evaluations was completed in 2010. Additional rounds were conducted in 2012, 2015, and 2018.

The ERA is modeled on similar assessment procedures internationally, such the Research Excellence Framework in Britain. It evaluates each university’s research outputs in terms of quality, research income, and other gauges of scholarly value.

In practice, this means that researchers are more dependent on quantitative measures to evaluate their research performance.

Flinders suggested that research expectations vary according to academics’ seniority and disciplines. Based on the data collected during the two previous ERA rounds, 2010 and 2012, Flinders suggested minimum thresholds for publication as well as research income. These were based upon the average number of publications per faculty member and the average amount that each discipline had received nationally. This meant that an archaeologist would need to produce at least three publications per year and generate at most Aus$40,000 in research income each year. It would have been sufficient for a Level B lecturer to produce just one publication per year and raise $5,000.

Although it seemed increasingly likely that universities would receive public funding tied to these ERA outcomes in the future, this has not yet happened. All Australian universities had to have these expectations in order to survive.

A changing academic world

Initial reactions of our department to the expectations for research were fear and anger. These emotions were first expressed in informal discussions over coffee or in the hallway and quickly dominated departmental meetings.

We were concerned that the proposal would signal a shift in how academics are held accountable for their performance. We were concerned about the assessment process and pondered the possible consequences. How would single-authored and multi-authored publications, grant proposals, and journal quality, count towards a researcher’s research performance?

We wondered what would happen if individuals did not meet the expectations for research-performance. Many university staff felt these proposed changes would penalize faculty whose research activities had been affected by their teaching responsibilities.

Our own field of archaeology had been discussing for many years our weaknesses in relation to the ERA framework. Our university’s previous ERA ranking for the discipline was a sobering 2, out of 5, which was considered below world standard. We had too many lower-quality papers (including vanity press articles whose publication costs are paid for by the author) and our research income was inconsistent and insufficient.

We were already on the right track to overcoming some of these problems, but we hadn’t yet created a strategic plan for them as a department in the next ERA round.

Although the university didn’t adopt the proposed research expectations (which were determined by staff after consultations), they did inspire us to act. Based on the measures proposed, we decided that we would benchmark ourselves as individual researchers and focus on our performance over five years. The results were disappointing. Although some staff members had held grants from our top national funding body, The Australian Research Council (ARC), at the time of benchmarking, none were grant holder.

While most of us were not able to exceed the targets for the number PhD students we supervised, the majority were. Below are the publication targets. We were not great, according to both the ERA rankings as well as the research-performance metrics the university had discussed.

We decided to confront this problem head-on together. Our first meeting was brutally honest, open, collaborative, and transparent. We discovered that, while people can deceive management and hide behind creative use of numbers within a document, they cannot deceive colleagues who are sitting across the table.

Fortunately, as a result of previous ERA rounds we had been reducing our teaching load and creating our own workload equalization formula in order to ensure that all staff had equal opportunities to conduct research.

The response

In a series strategic meetings, we discussed two key things: how to improve our future ERA rankings as a group, and how each individual staff member can perform in line to the university’s possible internal targets. There were three main strands to our response.

We first formed research teams and held workshops to identify research themes that covered the department’s existing work as well as future projects. These themes included topics like the archaeology in frontier conflict and colonialism in 19th century; green field archaeology, which seeks to find sites in previously unknown areas; and the development new conceptual frameworks for resolving unrecognized disjunctions among Indigenous world views and archaeological theory and practice.

Second, all academic staff members agreed that they would publish in the minimum publication metrics for their levels, as per the proposed research requirements, and that they would aim for the highest ranking journals in their subdisciplinary fields. This meant we would aim to publish in outlets with higher ERA counts. This meant that we would target journals with high citations, reach ones with a Scimago journal rank indicator in the top quarterile, and journals with high citations. This approach discouraged vanity publishers from publishing books or chapters in edited books.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we each agreed that we would submit one competitive national grant request per year, either as an individual or as part of research teams, for the three following years. To increase our chances of success, we developed these applications together and workshopped each other’s submissions to improve the quality.

A nationally competitive research fellowship is one of the indices of esteem that favorably counts in the ERA framework. We actively sought out scholars who were either potential candidates for an ARC-funded fellowship or had just been awarded one.

We wanted to create a supportive, collaborative, and cohesive team. We targeted people who we felt would make good colleagues and would help the team succeed. Not just their individual metrics, but the collective. The idea of working in a collaborative and high-achieving research environment attracted these scholars. Three new research fellows joined us each year in 2015/2016 and 2017. Each was later awarded tenure.

This became our five year research strategy for 2015 to 2020. We were supported by a new deputy vice president for research, who joined the university in 2015. We met as a team at the end of each academic year to discuss our progress and brainstorm ideas. Our deans and the deputy vice chancellor for research received our annual reports.

Our university was also consolidating its strategy. In 2018, the university underwent a major restructuring that included voluntary and involuntary redundancies, as well as reorganization and reorganization in academic and administrative areas. This prompted uncertainty and fears of job losses and although it resulted in a slightly greater number of academic positions overall, it changed the balance between teaching-and-research, research-only and teaching-specialist roles.

What was the impact of this?

We had done what seemed so obvious to us and created all the classic elements that make a productive research environment. We had deliberately maximized our research time; we had used that time to work towards a common goal; and we had created a collaborative environment that was well managed and led.

We are now seen as a success story by both the university’s senior management and ourselves. As a team, we created our own benchmarks for research and metrics. This helped us to avoid the restructuring of academic staff. It also increased our collective output. Every one of us was a recipient of ARC grants at the beginning of 2022. We have raised $12,838,662 ARC funding over the past five years. Each person’s output has increased through co-publishing, and the number of articles produced has tripled in the past five years. Our publications have also improved in quality: In 2015, only 16% of our journals made the top 10 titles in Scopus’ academic database Scopus. Today, it is 44%. We don’t need to have a strategy today. We only need to keep our existing research culture.

Our disciplinary efforts became a true collaboration with our college. We have received ongoing support over the years through the refurbishment and purchase of a new boat for maritime archaeologists and a new four wheel-drive vehicle. Three-and-a half new positions were also provided, two of which were for newly funded research fellows by the ARC. Our ongoing success is due to the university support.

Overall, the metrics show we are doing better in the funding game than we used to. We are more successful in securing funding and have applied for more. This has made a huge shift in our confidence. We went from secretly believing that we couldn’t write a grant application for ARC funding to realizing that we could. This allowed us to apply our skills to each other’s applications. We all work under greater pressure, so being more productive and collaborative is our survival strategy. We apply for teaching relief in grant applications to allow us to complete large research projects. Our university provides significant financial support and a more robust research environment, as reflected in funding and publications.

Our message is simple. You can thrive in any academic environment, even the most challenging. Although the tertiary-education system in Australia is still uncertain and fragile, we advise others to confront the problem honestly and work together. In these difficult times, it is more important to continue constructive collaboration than ever. So don’t do it alone. Find others who can help you, and then work together towards a common solution.