Produced in exclusive partnership with The Australian, the 2024 edition of the RESEARCH magazine highlights the top 250 researchers in Australia pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and innovation.

This year's overarching theme focuses on the "Big Ideas" within the academic sector. We explore how dynamic leadership and fresh thinking are accelerating research outcomes and driving real world impact across the nation's universities.

Key Themes Explored in 2024

• The Top 250 Researchers
  Our proprietary, data-driven methodology identifying Australia's leading minds across eight distinct academic disciplines.

• Big Ideas
  Exclusive interviews and insights from the leaders of Australia's 12 best research institutions on the future of innovation and discovery.

• Living Legends
  Honouring the lifetime achievements of Australia's most enduring and influential researchers who have shaped their disciplines on a global scale.

• World Beating Strengths
  An analysis of the specific research domains where Australian universities consistently outperform their international peers.

Our Data Science Methodology
Behind the journalism is League of Scholars' rigorous data engine. To find the Top 250 research leaders, our team uses advanced analytics to process publicly available information from Google Scholar. We calculate a specific "impact score" for every Australian researcher and institution, based on the number of citations their papers have received in the top 20 journals of their respective fields over the past five years. This evidence-based approach removes subjectivity, rewarding research quality, impact, and volume to provide a definitive, quantifiable landscape of Australian academic excellence.