Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)  is an assessment system administered by the Australian Research Council (ARC) that evaluates the quality of research conducted at Australian universities.

ERA is a comprehensive quality evaluation of all research produced in Australian universities against national and international benchmarks. The ratings are determined and moderated by committees of distinguished researchers, drawn from Australia and overseas. The unit of evaluation is broadly defined as the Field of Research (FoR) within an institution based on the Australia and New Zealand Standard Classification (ANZSRC).

ERA is based on expert review informed by a range of indicators. The indicators used in ERA include a range of metrics such as citation profiles, which are common to disciplines in the natural sciences, and peer review of a sample of research outputs which is more broadly common in the humanities and social sciences.

VU ERA 2018 data collection

The VU ERA 2018 publication data was collected through the publication management system, VU Elements.

VU Elements is an automatic search and harvest tool for research outputs from external sources, i.e. Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and ArXiv.

  • How to collect and submit your data
    Login to VU Elements and check you publications (all publications stored for HERDC and in VU's Research Repository should have already been gathered under 'My Publications').
  • Additional publications
    If you notice any publications that haven't been captured yet, you should enter/upload additional publications via VU Elements (refer to the VU Elements Quick Guide for instructions on how to do so).
  • Researcher Identification
    Researcher identifiers connect authors with their publications, including group name variants and institutions under which an author has published and worked (Identifiers can also distinguish authors with the same name).
  • ResearcherID
    Register yourself with Researcher ID and get your unique identifier. Record this number in VU Elements (to ensure the system searches appropriately for your outputs).
  • ORCID
    Register and get your unique ORCID identifier. ORCID can also facilitate linkage and synchronization of your ORCID identifier record data with external systems including Scopus and ResearcherID.
  • ScopusAuthor Identifier
    Search and identify your publications from Scopus author search. Ensure you have only one profile for your publications. Contact Scopus if update or corrections are required.
  • ORCID
    Register and get your unique ORCID identifier. ORCID can also facilitate linkage and synchronisation of your ORCID identifier record data with external systems including Scopus and ResearcherID.

Details of how to register and set up your profile with the above researcher identifying systems, refer to tips and instructions for setting up your researcher identifications.

VU ERA results

In the 2015 and 2018 ERA, Victoria University was rated well above world standard across several key research areas.

Contact us

For further information visit the ERA website or contact VU's ERA liaison:

Alex Skevofylakas, Manager, Research Information Systems & Reporting
+61 3 9919 5742 | [email protected].