Revealing future research capacity from an analysis of a national database of discipline-coded Australian PhD thesis records

This article reports how statistical analyses of PhD thesis recordscan reveal future research capacities for disciplines beyond theirprimary fields. The previous research showed that most thesescontributed to and/or used methodologies from more than onediscipline. In Australia, there was a concern for declining mathematicalteaching and research capacity. We decided to investigatethe ‘hidden’ mathematics research capacity in PhDs outside ofmathematics. Australian PhD records were re-coded with up tothree fields. Records with mathematics as one of their codes wereselected and analysed for their relationships to disciplines in theirother codes. Triple-coding revealed ‘hidden’ mathematicalresearch capacity that had previously been single-coded inanother field had mathematics as one of their subsequent fields.The findings have implications for policy and planning for mathematicsin Australia, and multiple coding of PhD theses recordsenables analyses for other disciplines to be undertaken to showtheir research capacities.