As scientists, my colleagues and I are often told we need to engage the general public and decision makers, to use our expertise to inform public discourse and debates and to reach a far wider audience than just our professional colleagues.
I very much believe in the importance of doing this. This is, for instance, my 25th article for The Conversation. I’ve also written scores of articles for other popular venues such as New Scientist, Natural History, Yale Environment 360, Australian Geographic, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, among others.
I also blog two to three times a week for a science and environmental website I founded, which now reaches around 50,000 people worldwide each week. And I write the occasional popular book too.
So, how much formal academic credit do my university or I get for all of these public-outreach efforts?
Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing.
How did we get here?
The Australian Research Council gauges scientific research activity by universities via their Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) ratings.
ERA scores range from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent) and reflect the quality of publications a university produces in a particular field, such as Environmental Science and Management, Medical Microbiology or Geochemistry.
In sciences, engineering, medical and health research, ratings are largely determined by how frequently journal articles are cited relative to world benchmarks. In the arts, humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, publications are evaluated by a comprehensive peer-review process.
The ERA has two main impacts on a university. Firstly, it is a key indicator of academic prestige. At James Cook University, for instance, we are very proud of our five-star rating in Environmental Science and Management. Secondly, the ERA has a modest impact on research funding: universities with higher ERA scores get a slightly bigger slice of government research monies.
Beyond the ERA, the federal Education Department also collects information on research productivity via its Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC). The HERDC is very significant as it is the basis for allocating large government research-block grants to universities (these totalled A$1.77 billion in 2015).
But here’s the catch. Neither the ERA nor HERDC give any weight at all to popular writing or non-traditional scientific projects. Rather, they’re based solely on publications in refereed journals, as well as technical books, refereed book chapters and refereed conference proceedings.
For the current rounds of the ERA, for example, the ARC lists over 24,000 eligible journals, but virtually every single one of them is aimed at a specialised academic audience, not at the general public.
By doing things this way, the government is actually creating a disincentive for researchers to do popular writing. The reason, of course, is that it takes time to do popular writing, and that’s time a researcher could spend producing research for a refereed journal.
And, of course, the same thing can be said for publication metrics for individual researchers, such as the h-index or one’s total number of citations. The main sources for estimating h-indices and citations are Thompson-Reuters and Scopus, based on extensive lists of refereed journals.