AARE Paper code: GOO05176 Page 1 What does international excellence in educational research look like? 1 Peter Goodyear Professor of Education Associate Dean (Research) Faculty of Education & Social Work, Education Building (A35) University of Sydney NSW2006 Australia P.Goodyear@edfac.usyd.edu.au Refereed paper presented at AARE Annual Conference, University of Western Sydney, 30 th November, 2005. Abstract Prompted by preparations for the introduction of a national scheme for assessing the quality and impact of publicly funded research, this paper investigates the question of how claims to international excellence in educational research might be advanced and evaluated. Drawing on national schemes of research assessment in other countries, it describes how the concept of international excellence in research has become embedded in the practices of assessment. The main part of the paper presents an analysis of the submissions of highly rated departments/schools of education in the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise. The UK RAE2001 dataset is a very rich source of information about research achievements, plans and strategies and about the ways in which images of excellence in research are constructed. Though already dated, it is still likely to be a significant source of benchmark information for the first run of an Australian research assessment exercise. It turns out that there is more than one way to construct defensible claims about international excellence in research. Subsidiary findings touch on the publishing choices of leading educational research groups, relations between size and status, the place of research grants, PhD completions and other metrics and the selection of indicators of esteem. Introduction Australia’s moves towards a national system of assessing the quality of university research are part of a trend which can be observed in many other countries. The recent review by von Tunzelmann & Kraemer Mbula (2003), for example, includes country reports on Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, USA, Canada 1 With apologies to Lyn Yates