Productivity and impact of astronomical facilities: A statistical study of publications and citations

In calendar years 2001 and 2002, 20 journals of astronomy and astrophysics published 7768 papers that reported or analyzed observations at wavelengths from meter radio to ultrahigh energy gamma rays. In the three calendar years after publication, these papers were cited more than 97000 times, according to the Science Citation Index/Web of Science data base (the most complete, we believe, available), for an average rate of 4.19 citations per paper per year. We slice these data up several ways, by subject matter, wavelength band, and the telescopes (etc.) used. Most of the results will not surprise: There are hot topics (cosmology, exoplanets) and not so hot topics (binary stars, planetary nebulae). Papers reporting space-based data are cited a bit more often and radio papers a bit less often than optical papers, but multi-wavelength studies do the best. The total number of telescopes involved is surprisingly large, about 330 optical and infrared (mostly ground based but including HST), 109 radio (including COBE and VSOP satellites), and 90 space based (including satellites, interplanetary probes, things carried on rockets, balloons, the Shuttle, and so forth). The superstar telescopes are (mostly) the ones you would expect, though having the most papers does not always go with largest ratios of citations per paper. HST produces the largest number of optical papers, but SDSS the most highly-cited ones, while the VLA is responsible for the largest number of radio papers and the most highly cited (apart from balloon-borne CMB observatories), and among things that fly, the most recent tend to dominate both paper and citation numbers. If you have to choose, it is probably better to opt for a small telescope on a well-supported site than a larger one with less support, and service to the community, in the form of catalogues and mission definitions, is rewarded, at least in citation counts, if not always in other ways. A few comparisons are made with other studies. The main difference is that we have included all the papers and all the telescopes for the years chosen, rather than focussing on one or a few observatories or skimming the cream of most-cited papers or ones from the highest-profile journals. © 2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA