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Database

The Research Evaluation and Policy Project has established a database containing all publications listing at least one Australian address that appear in journals in Institute of Scientific Information’s four main indices, the Science Citation Index (SCI), the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and Current Contents (CC).

The following information is contained in the database for each publication:

• Unique ISI publication code
• Code for single author or type of collaboration: e.g. international, national
• Name of journal
• Publication year
• Tape year (the year the publication was entered into the ISI database)
• Number of addresses listed
• Number of collaborating authors
• Number of pages
• Code showing sector (eg Academic, Government, etc) and ASRC field to which the address(es) given for the publication was classified
• Publication type ie article, note, letter, etc
• ISI Index in which publication is found
• Standardised address(es)
• Citations received by the publication in the year of publication and in each subsequent year

When studying the university sector, we are particularly interested in being able to undertake analysis at the level of department, and in order to do this we ‘clean’ the raw files obtained from ISI. We ensure that all variations of the same address are grouped together and that all publications with variants of that address are allocated to one ‘standardised’ address. For all universities and the CSIRO, addresses are ‘cleaned’ down to the department level, while in other sectors (with some minor variations) ‘cleaning’ is only done at the institution level.

This database is not restricted to university publications; it also covers hospitals, medical research institutes, government departments and research in the private sector. The database currently contains the details of 414,897 Australian publications covering the period 1981 to 2006. In addition to the publications data, information is also included on the number of times each of these items was cited by other publications in the ISI indices during the same period. This information is updated annually.