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Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems VI ASP Conference Series, Vol. 125, 1997 Gareth Hunt and H. E. Payne, eds.

The Sociology of Astronomical Publication Using ADS and ADAMS
Eric Schulman
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National Radio Astronomy Observatory,2 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesvil le, VA 22903-2475, E-mail: eschulma@nrao.edu James C. French, Allison L. Powell Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesvil le, VA 22903-2442, E-mail: french@cs.virginia.edu, alp4g@cs.virginia.edu Stephen S. Murray, Guenther Eichhorn, Michael J. Kurtz Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, E-mail: ssm@cfa.harvard.edu, gei@cfa.harvard.edu, kurtz@cfa.harvard.edu Abstract. We use the NASA Astrophysics Data System database of astronomical abstracts in seven ma jor astronomy journals to study trends in astronomical publication over the last twenty years. Two of the most interesting trends are the decreasing fractions of pap ers with one author and the increasing numb er of authors p er pap er.

1.

Introduction

The sociology of astronomical publication has traditionally b een p erformed by looking for publication trends using every pap er published in a few selected journals within a few selected years. For example, Abt (1981) examined the pap ers published in ApJ, ApJS, AJ, and PASP during the first year of each decade from 1910 to 1980. By analyzing the NASA Astrophysics Data System3 (ADS) database of astronomical abstracts we can study a large numb er of issues in the sociology of astronomical publication while including every pap er published in a numb er of refereed journals during the past twenty years. Here we present preliminary results of a study of astronomical publication trends using pap ers published in A&A, A&AS, AJ, ApJ, ApJS, MNRAS, and PASP b etween 1975 and 1995.

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Jansky Fellow. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under co operative agreement by Asso ciated Universities, Inc. http://adswww.harvard.edu/

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Figure 1.

Fraction of ApJ and A&A Pap ers with N Authors.

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The Astrophysics Data System Database

The ADS abstract service contains approximately 240,000 abstracts of astronomy and astrophysics pap ers from more than 1000 journals (Accomazzi et al. 1997). Most ADS abstracts of pap ers published b etween 1975 and 1995 were obtained through the NASA Scientific and Technical Information4 (STI) Program, which compiled pap ers from the ma jority of astronomical journals. Although the database is at least 95% complete, there are some systematic errors in the data. For example, the STI author lists were truncated at the tenth author until ab out 1986 (e.g., Cohen et al. 1975 has fourteen authors, but ADS only lists the first ten). Between 1986 and 1990, ApJ and ApJS author lists were not truncated, but author lists in the other five journals were truncated at five authors, and from 1991 to 1994 the author lists in these five journals were truncated at ten authors. The numb er of author list truncations can b e substantially reduced by comparing the ADS database with the Strasb ourg Astronomical Data Center's SIMBAD5 (Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data) database, a process that is currently underway. The SIMBAD database includes all pap ers since 1983 that mention at least one astronomical ob ject (excluding Solar System b odies; pap ers published since 1950 that mention individual stars are also included). SIMBAD currently has information on 85,000 pap ers from 90 journals and conference proceedings.

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http://www.sti.nasa.gov/ http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad.html


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Figure 2.

Fraction of Pap ers with One Author.

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Numb er of Authors Per Pap er

The fraction of ApJ and A&A pap ers with one to five authors is shown in Figure 1. The most striking change is the decrease in the fraction of singleauthor pap ers from more than 1/3 to ab out 1/8 . The fraction of two-author pap ers remained fairly constant, while pap ers with larger numb ers of authors b ecame more frequent. The NASA STI truncation of A&A author lists is obvious b etween 1985 and 1990. The decrease in the fraction of single-author pap ers has occurred in all seven journals (Figure 2), although the fraction of single-author pap ers in PASP remains fairly large. Even though the NASA STI truncations make it difficult to analyze the mean numb er of authors p er pap er, it is still obvious that there are on average more authors p er pap er now than there were twenty years ago. There are a numb er of p ossible reasons for decreasing fractions of singleauthor pap ers and increasing numb ers of authors p er pap er. One is the growth of multiwavelength astrophysics (Abt 1993), which requires astronomers to b e proficient in multiple wavebands or to collab orate with exp erts in other wavelengths. Another is an increase in the numb er of pap ers that present b oth observations and theoretical interpretations. A third is increasing comp etition for jobs and grants, which encourages astronomers to write as many pap ers as p ossible. Also, in the last five years there has b een more research requiring large collab orations, such as using HST to determine Cepheid distances to nearby galaxies (e.g., Kelson et al. 1996, with 18 authors). There were nine pap ers with 50 or more authors in our sample, all of which app eared in the ApJ or ApJS after 1990. Five were a series of pap ers rep orting on intensive HST,


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IUE, and ground-based optical and near-IR sp ectroscopic monitoring studies of Seyfert galaxies (e.g., Clavel et al. 1991, with 57 authors). The other four pap ers, including the 124-author Ahlen et al. (1993), were rep orts of high-energy cosmic ray exp eriments. 4. Future Work With ADAMS

In future work we will use the Advanced Data Management System6 (ADAMS; Pfaltz & French 1993; Pfaltz 1993), an ob ject-oriented database language that supp orts a single shared, distributed data space that can b e accessed by applications programs coded in C, C++, fortran, or Pascal. The class hierarchy supp orts multiple inheritance and user-defined data typ es. Unlike many ob jectoriented database languages, attributes in ADAMS are first class ob jects so schema evolution is particularly easy. We will b e analyzing the ADS database within ADAMS to develop improved methods of searching document collections. One of the goals of this work is to provide a sophisticated browse facility as an adjunct service to ordinary keyword searches in document retrieval systems. The idea is to use a keyword search to establish an initial focus and then let the searcher access additional documents by identifying a document of interest and asking for more documents "like this one." An underlying topical map will b e maintained to supp ort this kind of browse mechanism. Acknowledgments. We thank Ellen Bouton for her invaluable assistance in finding and describing many different journals, and for very useful conversations ab out astronomical publication. This research is based on data obtained through NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, and is supp orted by grants from NASA (NCCW-0024), the DOE (DE-FG05-95ER25254), and the NSF (CDA-9529253). References Abt, H. A. 1981, PASP, 93, 269 Abt, H. A. 1993, PASP, 105, 437 Accomazzi, A., Eichhorn, G., Kurtz, M. J., Grant, C. S., & Murray, S. S. 1997, this volume, 357 Ahlen, S., et al. 1993, ApJ, 412, 301 Clavel, J., et al. 1991, ApJ, 366, 64 Cohen, M. H., et al. 1975, ApJ, 201, 249 Kelson, D. D., et al. 1996, ApJ, 463, 26 Pfaltz, J. L. 1993, The ADAMS Language: A Tutorial and Reference Manual, Technical Rep ort IPC-93-03, University of Virginia Institute for Parallel Computation Pfaltz, J. L., & French, J. C. 1993, Data Engineering, 16, 14

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