Promoting Aboriginal Health

This is a book on trends in development research with particular focus on Aboriginal Australia. As a multidisciplinary team the author and colleagues have undertaken 10-12 systematic literature searches of trends in a wide range of aspects of Aboriginal development. Examples of the reviews include Aboriginal education research output 1980-2000s; community development since 2000; cultural competency since 2000; child/maternal health since 1990s; the economics and Aboriginal development research, etc . The main rationale for this book is that governments and research policymakers are struggling to find ways to assess the contribution of research to the growth of particular fields of research. The approaches to date such as citation frequency, proportion of research grant allocated to particular fields, etc all have serious limitations. The authors are proposing an alternative supplementary approach which is to examine the total publication output of the field over time in terms of types of publications, quality of the publications and engagement with key priority issues, e.g. sustainability. The main target audience will be research policy makers, researchers and research students. §