Excellence in Research for Australia

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) is a research management initiative of the Australian Rudd Government developed by the Australian Research Council (ARC).

It replaced the Research Quality Framework that was developed by the Howard Government.

In addition to the Higher Education Research Data Collection, which collects statistics about research in Australia, the ERA collected itemised data, with all research classified according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Field of Research (FOR) classification scheme.

For the 2010 data collection, the Field of Research codes are distributed into the following eight clusters:

For the 2012 data collection, the clusters were changed. The SBE cluster was split into two new EHS and EC clusters, and the BCH and PAH clusters were merged to form a "Medical and Health Sciences" cluster. The Field of Research codes are distributed into the following eight clusters:

The following institutions are deemed eligible to submit data to the government as part of the ERA initiative.

On 6 December 2012 Senator the Hon Chris Evans, Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations, announced the outcomes of the ERA 2012 process, with the release of the ERA 2012 National report.

In 2009, two trials were conducted for the clusters "Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences" (PCE) and "Humanities and Creative Arts" (HCA), and reports have been published using this data.

In 2010, institutions were required to submit data for all eight clusters between June 1–18.

On 25 October 2010 the government announced that ERA data will be collected again in 2012.

The ARC maintains a list of journals that are eligible for inclusion in the ERA. The ARC initially stated that these journals would be ranked using the following "four tiers of quality rating":

After the publication of its draft rankings, ERA introduced a form aimed at all scholars who wished to put a journal forward for the list. There were just three conditions for such a proposal: that the journal be "a scholarly, peer reviewed journal with an ISSN", that the person making the proposal state whether he/she was a member of the editorial board, and that the decision remain at ARC’s discretion. This consultation procedure led to a significant increase in the number of journals in the final list: for example, Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) journals went from 10,241 to 12,976. The percentage distributions were not recalled and not adhered to in the final list which was released on 9 February 2010, though the proportion of A* and A journals did not correlate directly with the performance of different disciplines.

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