ABS Updates Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications. (April 1, 2008)

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, yesterday announced that the new Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) will be used to define disciplines and the make-up of "discipline clusters" in the Government's proposed Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) replacement for the previous government's Research Quality Framework (RQF).

ANZSRC was developed during the past 18 months by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). The ARC is responsible for implementing the ERA.

Senator Carr said: "This will mean a significantly reduced volume of research areas categorised as 'not elsewhere classified' and that the information obtained through the ERA will be more easily compared with international data."

ANZSRC now contains about 40% more research codes than the 1998 Standard Research Classification it replaces, and was developed in collaboration with Statistics New Zealand following consultation with users of the previous codes.

The President of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), Professor Ken Baldwin, agreed the new classification provides a much better picture of contemporary research than the previous 1998 classification. He pointed out:

Nanotechnology, quantum computing, carbon sequestration science, green chemistry, bioinformatics and agricultural biotechnology are a few examples of important research that are now included in the ABS classification.

All research classifications become redundant as new areas emerge and previous staples become redundant so today¹s listings will need on-going monitoring and changes as required.

Good data on R&D investment is essential to help institutions, funding agencies and Governments better understand where research investment is happening and how that sits with institutional or national priorities.

A report on the ABS Research Classifications published by FASTS in August 2006 found that the 1998 classification was no longer adequate and had no analytic, policy or strategic value.

A measure of the mismatch of the codes and actual research was the growing use of Oother¹ categories, which had grown to over 20% of university R&D expenditure by 2004. Moreover, 32% of university R&D could not or was not allocated to specific codes. That is, $1.4b of the $4.3b universities spent on R&D in 2004 was not adequately coded.

Professor Baldwin believes "the new classifications will be an important tool to ensure clarity in organising the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) project to assist evaluation of publicly funded research".