Summary

This report is one of a series that explores a newly available bibliometric dataset to analyse the research performance of New Zealand universities. It presents important baseline data that can be used to help in future analysis of the impacts of the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) on research performance.

The first report in this series – (ex)Citing research – examined the academic impact of research by New Zealand universities over a period of 25 years between 1981 and 2005. This new report compares the academic impact of research produced by New Zealand universities, in the form of citations per full-time equivalent researcher, with the quality of research at the universities, as measured by Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) average quality scores, across 10 broad subject areas. In doing so, this report contributes to the evaluation of the PBRF.

Key findings

• Each of the ten broad subject panels analysed in this report exhibit a positive association between the quality of research and the academic impact of research – that is, a higher level of academic quality is associated with a higher level of academic impact. However, the strength of this relationship varies between the subject panels and between 2003 and 2006.

• Overall, the 'biological sciences' panel displays the strongest degree of association between research quality and academic impact. Other panels with a reasonable degree of association between academic impact and research quality are 'engineering, technology and architecture', 'education' and 'medicine and public health'. Of the remaining subject panels, the lowest degree of association between academic impact and research quality is in the 'business and economics' panel.

• The degree of variation between research quality and academic impact found in this report would suggest that the peer review process used in the PBRF quality evaluations is not simply mirroring what is shown in citations data. However, given the limitations of the data used in this analysis, further research, which links the citations directly to the researchers in the PBRF Quality Evaluation, would more conclusively indicate the strength of the association between research quality and academic impact.