Tim Dodd

Researchers at Macquarie Business School have found surprising reasons why project planners often make poor estimates of project timelines.

Sometimes big things grow from small and inauspicious beginnings, and that’s the story of the 2025 Nobel prize in Chemistry. In 1974, University of Melbourne chemist Richard Robson had an idea. He toyed with it for 10 years before trying it out in his lab. Then in the mid-1980s, working alone and without fanfare, he took the first steps in creating a new class of manufactured material – today known as metal-organic frameworks (or MOFs) – which have extraordinary properties.

You won’t find an Australian university which is not putting its research resources behind the quest for greater sustainability. But how are universities doing this and with what results?

Welcome to The Australian’s 2026 Research magazine, the latest edition of our annual publication which presents a comprehensive picture of Australia’s best research, naming the top performers in 250 different fields of inquiry. It is the eighth year that we have made this major effort to curate the available public data about research, using a different lens to analyse the output of Australia’s knowledge-creation industry.

Let your imagination roam for a minute. Imagine that the attributes of a research paper – its topics and its findings – can be summarised and represented by a point in a vast space. But we don’t stop there. We summarise more research papers and populate this space with more points, countless numbers of them. Papers that are on similar topics are represented by points that are near each other while papers on dissimilar topics are further apart. The more different a pair of papers are, the greater the distance between them.

Since 2015, when the United Nations announced its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, they have been an accepted yardstick for estimating progress in building sustainability in the widest sense, encompassing environmental, social, equity and governance issues.