Editorial: Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry from Australia.

Abstract

The medicinal chemistry research published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry by corresponding authors based in Australia predominantly originated from Australian universities, with academic authors accounting for 49 of the 52 manuscripts published in the period January 2015 to August 2017. The Australian Research Council has responsibility for administering Australia’s national research evaluation framework, known as Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). ERA evaluates the research conducted within Australia’s higher education research institutions by comparison with international benchmarks including, but not limited to, research outputs, research income, patents, and research commercialization. The ERA evaluation classifies and reports university research performance at the individual discipline level (157 possible disciplines) using a five-point scale, where rating 5 corresponds to outstanding performance “well above world standard” and rating 1 corresponds to performance “well below world standard”. In the most recent ERA round (2015), 12 of Australia’s 40 universities nominated for evaluation against the discipline area of “Medicinal and Biomolecular Chemistry”. Of the 12 universities, two universities were rated as 5 (performance well above world standard), nine universities were rated as 4 (performance above world standard), and one university was rated as 3 (performance at world standard). Notably, 8 of the 12 universities have contributed 46 of the 49 academic corresponding author publications in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry in the period considered here. More information about ERA can be found at (http://www.arc.gov.au/excellence-research-australia).