A generation of astronomical telescopes, their users, and publications

Abstract

Research astronomers and the telescopes they use each have typical life spans of about 40 years. Most of their journals live a good deal longer, though the second most important one today is only 40 years old. This paper looks at numbers for productivity and impact of specific astronomical facilities, changes in equality of opportunities and achievements in observational astronomy, and some aspects of national contributions. The focus is on optical astronomy, though something is also said about radio telescopes and astronomy from space. In summary, nothing stays ''best of class'' for very long; the fraction of the community with access to the most valuable facilities has increased with time (more equality of opportunity); but the fraction of citations earned by the few superstar papers has also increased (less equality of achievement); and the USA remains the host of the most-cited journals and the most productive telescopes, though Europe (meaning in this context the member nations of the European Southern Observatory, the European Space Agency, and the supporters of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics) are fast closing the gap, with the UK retaining its own journal and some observing facilities not shared with either the USA or other European countries. Detailed examination of specific facilities indicates that size (of telescope, community, and budget) are all of great importance, but that the most significant ''focal plane instrument'' is still the astronomer at the virtual eyepiece. The changes have happened against a background of enormous increases in numbers of astronomers, sizes of available facilities (but not total number), numbers of papers (but not of journals), and numbers of citations per paper. A significant subset of the conclusions on turnover of people and facilities accompanying major growth: opportunity versus achievement; Europe versus the USA; and the trade-off between community size and the influence of individual scientists undoubtedly apply in many other fields.

Assessing and tracing the outcomes and impact of research infrastructures

“…Trimble () performed a retrospective study of the astronomical literature produced between 1960 and 1964 to examine facility metrics for an earlier time period. Trimble (), the last study in this series (thus far), performed a comparative analysis of the data from each time period examined in the past studies, namely, articles published in the 1960s, 1990s, and 2000s. The key takeaway from Trimble's longitudinal analysis is that the number of “dominant” facilities, as measured by articles produced and citations accrued, has stayed relatively consistent across four decades, but that the dominant facilities themselves have changed.…”

“…She uses this analysis to suggest that the “half life” of the observatories is around 40 years; the term “half life” is undefined in Trimble's studies, but her usage is better interpreted as ‘the time period in which the facility is productive,’ not the typical usage meaning the time in which half of the articles and citations are produced. Finally, Trimble et al (), Trimble and Ceja (), and Trimble () all note that articles that used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data collections showed large citation and publication rates in comparison to the other observation facilities examined. Abt () provides a similar finding on the growing significance of the reuse of existing data from large‐scale observational surveys, such as the SDSS.…”

« Cela nous a échappé… » : théorie de l’acteur-réseau et le problème des générations scientifiques

“…La notion de génération semble a priori bien établie dans le répertoire conceptuel du sociologue comme de l'historien des sciences. Sans chercher ici l'exhaustivité, cette notion apparaît tour à tour pour caractériser (a) des communautés de recherche (Abbott, 2001 ;Adams, 1972 ;Beaud, 2012 ;Feuer, 1974 ;James, 1985 ;Kaiser, 2006), (b) des expérimentations (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), (c) des instruments ou des équipements technoscientifiques (Collins, 2004(Collins, , 2011Odagiri et al, 1997 ;Simoulin, 2012 ;Trimble, 2010), (d) des publications et des citations scientifiques (Fragkiadaki et Evangelidis, 2016), (e) des innovations techniques (Antonio de Souza et al, 2015 ;Soneryd, 2007 ), ou encore (f) des publics qui contribuent à forger l'image sociale des sciences (Miller, 1982). Mais par delà l'évidence des usages, force est de constater que la grande majorité de ces travaux évite soigneusement de définir précisément cette notion.…”