New Zealand’s research workforce

This study is part of the multi-year programme “Te Ara Paerangi–Future Pathways” by New Zealand’s Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Part of the Te Ara Paerangi programme is a review of how research in this country is currently being organised and funded. This study supports this review by providing an analysis of the New Zealand research workforce over time, using existing data. The latter included bibliographic records of academic publications from the open-source database OpenAlex that were used as a proxy for academic research employment. Other sources of information were global population data from The World Bank, New Zealand data from Education Counts, and data from Stats NZ. Based on these data, the analysis focused on demographics of university graduates (studying towards a Doctor of Philosophy, PhD), and their retention and career progression in the New Zealand research workforce across different organisations and disciplines. It included comparisons with the research workforce in Australia, Ireland, and Singapore.

There were approximately 18,029 active publishing researchers in the New Zealand workforce in 2019. Their affiliations were predominantly from tertiary institutions (11,893 researchers), followed by healthcare organisations (1,458 researchers), crown research institutes (CRIs; 1,448 researchers), and other organisations (e.g., independent research organisations or individuals and private companies; 647 researchers). A considerable number of New Zealand authors had an unknown affiliation (e.g., 2,586 researchers in 2019), resulting from insufficient information about author affiliations or from errors in the OpenAlex database.

There was an increase in the New Zealand research workforce from 2010, when there was a total of 12,297 actively-publishing researchers in the country. The number of actively-publishing researchers grew at an average annual rate of 4.3%. The average annual rate of increase in the research workforce was similar at tertiary institutions and healthcare organisations (4.7 and 4.9%, respectively), whereas it was low for CRIs (0.9%). The growth of New Zealand’s research workforce was slower than that in Australia, Ireland, and Singapore in the past ten years.

Trends in the number of entrants to the research workforce included a (three-fold) increase in the number of PhD graduates between 2003 and 2020. Recent increases (i.e., within the last ten years) were largely determined by PhD students originating from overseas. These trends were evident across all research fields. The introduction of the Performance Based Research Fund in 2003, and equal access to PhD studies for international students in 2005 led to more than double the number of PhD completions each year; however, the number of academic full-time equivalent (FTE) staff at universities remained relatively constant over this period. The number of Māori PhD graduates remained largely unchanged since 2010, whereas the proportion of Māori graduates decreased from 6.4% in 2004 to 3.8% in 2019.

In contrast to the overall increase in graduates, there was no concomitant increase in FTE staff roles at universities, representing a mis-match between PhD graduates and academic employment opportunities. This aspect was reflected in the lower retention of PhD graduates in the New Zealand research workforce in recent years, evident in a decreasing proportion of PhD graduates continuing to actively publish within five years of their graduation. This finding was the same for both domestic and international students, and appeared to be linked to researchers leaving academic publishing.

The current analysis approach used publication records to characterise New Zealand’s research workforce. Based on the OpenAlex data and New Zealand data subsets identified here, potential future analyses include investigations of collaboration patterns within New Zealand, and of potential effects of changes in government policy, and assessing aspects pertaining to precarity and career progression by research field and research organisation. Although the current study was limited to researchers who actively publish academic papers, it is acknowledged that the New Zealand research workforce also contains a proportion of researchers who do not disseminate their research findings through academic publications. Examples include researchers who conduct commercially-sensitive studies or disseminate their findings through other forms of written outputs (e.g., conference proceedings).