Trends in Astronomical Publication Between 1975 and 1996

Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. Ser.

Eichhorn

Accomazzi

et al. 2000

113

101

Abstract. The NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service has become a key component of astronomical research. It provides bibliographic information daily, or near daily, to a majority of astronomical researchers worldwide.We describe the history of the development of the system and its current status. Urania (Boyce 1996), and the ADS role in the emerging electronic astronomical data environment are discussed. Astronomy is unique in that it already has a fully functional data resource, where several of the most important data sources exist on-line and interoperate nearly seamlessly. The ADS and the Strasbourg Data Center (CDS; Genova et al. 2000) form the core of this resource.We show several examples of how to use the ADS, and we show how ADS use has increased as a function of time. Currently it is still increasing exponentially, with a doubling time for number of queries of 17 months.Using the ADS logs we make the first detailed model of how scientific journals are read as a function of time since publication. We find four distinct components. We directly compare the readership rate with the citation rate for scientific articles as a function of age. Citations generally follow reads, but there are some differences.The main journals of astronomy have differences in the ways they are read and cited. We discuss these from a number of different aspects.The impact of the ADS on astronomy can be calculated after making some simple assumptions. We find that the ADS increases the efficiency of astronomical research by 333 Full Time Equivalent (2000 hour) research years per year, and that the value of the early development of the ADS for astronomy, compared with waiting for mature technologies to be adopted, is 2332 FTE research years.A full technical description of the ADS is in three companion articles:

“…The number of papers published in the Big8 has been increasing at about 4% per year during this 22 year period (Schulman et al 1997;Abt 1998; Fig. 11), Fig.…”

Section: Readership As a Function Of Agementioning

confidence: 95%

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Overview

Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. Ser.

Eichhorn

Accomazzi

et al. 2000

113

101

“…These studies can often come to different conclusions than studies using normalized counts would; Herbstein (1993) has argued that the normalized counts are more accurate. These differences are becoming more pronounced as the number of authors per papers increases (e.g., Schulman et al, 1997) and especially due to the trend to have articles with very long author lists.…”

Section: Measuring Individual Research Productivity Using Reads and Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

The bibliometric properties of article readership information

Eichhorn

Accomazzi

et al. 2004

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

Digital libraries such as the NASA Astrophysics Data System (Kurtz et al., 2005) permit the easy accumulation of a new type of bibliometric measure, the number of electronic accesses ("reads") of individual articles. We explore various aspects of this new measure. We examine the obsolescence function as measured by actual reads and show that it can be well fit by the sum of four exponentials with very different time constants. We compare the obsolescence function as measured by readership with the obsolescence function as measured by citations. We find that the citation function is proportional to the sum of two of the components of the readership function. This proves that the normative theory of citation is true in the mean. We further examine in detail the similarities and differences among the citation rate, the readership rate, and the total citations for individual articles, and discuss some of the causes. Using the number of reads as a bibliometric measure for individuals, we introduce the read-cite diagram to provide a two-dimensional view of an individual's scientific productivity. We develop a simple model to account for an individual's reads and cites and use it to show that the position of a person in the read-cite diagram is a function of age, innate productivity, and work history. We show the age biases of both reads and cites and develop two new bibliometric measures which have substantially less age bias than citations: SumProd, a weighted sum of total citations and the readership rate, intended to show the total productivity of an individual; and Read10, the readership rate for articles published in the last 10 years, intended to show an individual's current productivity. We also discuss the effect of normalization (dividing by the number of authors on a paper) on these statistics. We apply SumProd and Read10 using new, nonparametric techniques to compare the quality of different astronomical research organizations.

“…For example, in the field of astrophysics, both the mean number of references and the mean number of authors have approximately doubled in the last 20 years. [23,24] Some of the lesser challenges associated with using citations to measure research productivity of individuals are:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Measure of Total Research Impact Independent of Time and Discipline

Pepe

2012

PLoS ONE

Authorship and citation practices evolve with time and differ by academic discipline. As such, indicators of research productivity based on citation records are naturally subject to historical and disciplinary effects. We observe these effects on a corpus of astronomer career data constructed from a database of refereed publications. We employ a simple mechanism to measure research output using author and reference counts available in bibliographic databases to develop a citation-based indicator of research productivity. The total research impact (tori) quantifies, for an individual, the total amount of scholarly work that others have devoted to his/her work, measured in the volume of research papers. A derived measure, the research impact quotient (riq), is an age-independent measure of an individual's research ability. We demonstrate that these measures are substantially less vulnerable to temporal debasement and cross-disciplinary bias than the most popular current measures. The proposed measures of research impact, tori and riq, have been implemented in the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System.