Collaboration metrics provide information on research partnerships of academic entities from institutions, research groups or individual researchers.

Collaboration and benchmarking metrics may be used to:

• demonstrate capacity to build collaborative research partnerships   
• provide evidence of interdisciplinary collaboration   
• demonstrate research capacity and productive research engagements and collaborations - internal & external   
• benchmark globally against other researchers and other institutions   
• provide evidence of engagement with industry, government or community

The academic collaboration metric enables benchmarking by comparing citation data of researchers in similar fields at three levels of geographic criteria: same institution, national and international.

The academic-corporate collaboration metric uses citation data to record scholarly activity between a researcher and other sectors such as private industry, government and NGOs.

Examples of research collaboration are being a joint author on a publication, networking at a conference, following and connecting with a researcher via social media or participating on a research project.

See the Library online guide: Strategic publishing for information and tools about publishing your work.

Excellence in Research for Australia

The Australian Government seeks to measure the research quality of Australian Tertiary Institutions through the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) process. Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assesses research quality within Australia's higher education sector. It is managed by the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Some of the more commonly used tools for identifying potential collaborators and measuring institutional research metrics include SciVal, Incites and Essential Science Indicators.