Robyn's Blog : Stats

GradStats 2008

robyn.owens — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 03:20:00 GMT

Christmas has come and gone, and the University has been shutdown for two days now, so it's time to sum up the year with some GradStats.

Enrolments and completions are both up in 2008, with completions being at their highest ever point in a calendar year.

Here is a summary for the past three years:

	2006	2007	2008
Enrolled	1801	1776	1838
Submitted	158	179	154
Completed	271	306	317
Distinctions	17	25	24

2-day Stats Workshop on R

robyn.owens — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:16:00 GMT

Not sure what to do when you get back from your holidays? Want to meet some new research students? Can't figure out what to do with your data?

Over two days, 8-9 January 2008, the UWA Statistical Consulting Group is offering short course designed to introduce the language and software environment of R, which is extremely powerful for data analysis, statistical computing and graphics.

The course is primarily directed at postgraduate research students, but will also be of interest to other researchers and academic staff, especially those with a background in medicine or science.

More detail about this course, including fees, can be found on their website.

OSCAR - a survey of supervision

robyn.owens — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:57:00 GMT

All research students should recently have received a letter asking them to complete an online survey on supervision. The survey questionaire is called OSCAR - On Supervision, Candidature And Research. It only takes a few minutes to fill in, but the results will give us valuable information about where to focus our resources in order to improve things for you and for future students. Your participation is encouraged.

The Hirsch index

robyn.owens — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:04:00 GMT

For those of you thinking of having an academic or research career, now is the time to start thinking very seriously about the quality and impact of your track record. My first piece of advice is choose your appellation carefully, and then stick to it from now on. I would recommend choosing something distinctive if possible, e.g., use all the initials in your name (H. P. Bloggs) to separate yourself from all the other H. Bloggs out there.

The next thing to do is always publish in good quality journals and the higher the impact factor, the better. What counts after that of course is the number of citations that your work generates.

I am finding that increasingly reviewers are using a researcher's H-index, first suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005. The H-index of a researcher is defined as the largest number N for which that researcher has N publications with at least N citations. So say you have 10 publications each with total cites as follows: 600, 50, 10, 7, 7, 7, 2, 1, 1, 1. In this case, your H-index is 6: you have 6 papers with at least 6 citations each, but you don't have 7 papers with at least 7 citations each.

The H-index has a lot of advantages over simply the total number of papers or the total number of citations. It attempts to measure how broad the impact of your work is. There are also some criticisms about using it as a single measure of a researcher's impact. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number

You can calculate your own H-index by using the Web of Science through the Library website (this is a great tool - in the Library website use the Supersearch facility to find the Web of Science resource) or by using Google Scholar . However don't expect it to be too high just yet; citations take time.

Grad Stats

robyn.owens — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:29:00 GMT

Ever wondered what UWA gets up to in the higher degree by research area? Well, this year, 2006, we had at the peak period 2045 enrolled students. That's now down to 1820 as various among you have submitted for examination, completed, suspended or withdrawn. I'm hoping we can get up to at least 2200 sometime early in the New Year as all the new scholarship holders come on board.

Our enrolled students are mostly doing PhDs (1311) but others are doing Masters by Thesis (159), Professional Doctorates (195) and Masters by Thesis and Coursework (155).

As of yesterday, we have registered 255 completions this year, with 14 of those being awarded a Distinction. Distinctions are given to candidates who, in the opinion of their examiners and the Board of the Graduate Research School, fall into the top 5% of all research students internationally. It's a pretty elite group. The best PhD thesis in any calendar year is also awarded the Robert Street Prize.

At the moment there are 154 theses submitted for examination. This number is pretty constant throughout the whole year, oscillating between about 120 and 170. It means the examination office is always busy.

Official statistics on enrolments and completions are compiled and reported to the Federal Government office DEST on the 31st March each year, and are used in the Government's formulae for distributing research and research training funds. Since this year we had a substantial increase in the number of scholarships we could offer, both for domestic and international students, we should see some increases in our numbers next year. There have certainly been some pretty exciting research proposals among the applications.