These rankings are based on figures from the standard version of Thomson Scientific’s Australian University Indicators 1981-2006, a database containing publication and citation statistics for more than 50 universities and research institutes. This coverage represents an expansion over the initial edition of Thomson’s Australian database (and the 1996 survey in these pages), which only reflected university research. The current figures include such facilities as the Howard Florey Institute and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center. (Note: the research institutes in the database were all considered separately, and their papers and citations were not included with any of the universities with which they might be affiliated. For example, papers from the Howard Florey Institute were not included with those from the University of Melbourne, even in instances where the institutions appear together within a single author-address listing.)

The research institutes, as it happens, make a good showing in the impact tables, despite generally publishing fewer papers than powerhouses such as the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. In molecular biology & genetics, for example, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), with its 164 Thomson-indexed papers in the field, and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center, with 101, take the top two spots for impact, as they also do in the field of immunology. WEHI, in fact, as the third table shows, outscores all other universities and institutions in overall impact, with an average of nearly 20 citations per paper. WEHI also registers in the total-citations rankings, in molecular biology & genetics, immunology, and even mathematics—the latter thanks to a handful of papers that include highly cited bioinformatics reports from Statistica Sinica on statistical methods for identifying gene expression in microarray experiments.

In some of the fields ranked by impact, a few smaller-producing institutions lost out due to the varying thresholds of paper output set by Science Watch for each field (in order to account for differences in journal populations and citation patterns between specialty areas). In physics, for example, Griffith University scored a solid 5.65 cites per paper, but the university’s paper count of 161 was below the threshold of 200 set for this survey. Similarly, the Institute of Advanced Studies registered an impact mark of 6.45 in chemistry, but its output of 128 chem papers was shy of the field’s 200-paper threshold.

Output, needless to say, was no problem for the large, heavy-hitting universities that dominate the rankings here, as they did in the previous survey. The most-prolific schools, as shown in the third table—the universities of Sydney, Queensland, Melbourne, and New South Wales—each appear in at least 9 of the total-citations rankings and at least 5 of the impact listings. On this score, perhaps the University of Melbourne did best of all: 11 appearances by total citations, 10 by impact, and "Top 3" placements for both impact and total citations in 5 fields: physics, neurosciences, pharmacology, microbiology, and psychology/psychiatry.