Daily Image
08-10-2010
WSRT@40 - publish and be damned!
| Submitter: | Michael Garrett |
| Description: | In October, ASTRON will celebrate the WSRT's 40th anniversary. One measure of a telescope's productivity is the number of refereed papers it has produced and the number of citations these papers have received in the literature. According to the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a simple and very incomplete search for "WSRT" or "Westerbork" in the abstract field yields ~730 refereed publications, with a total of 21982 citations. A little investigation shows that this is certainly a gross underestimate, and careful inspection shows that many important and highly cited papers are missing, including many Nature & Science papers, incl. Racusin et al. 2009 , Gallo et al. 2005, Dennett-Thorpe & de Bruyn (2002) , Galama et al. 1999 - to name just a few. The list also contains a few false positives but we should also note that it does not include the vast majority of VLBI publications involving the WSRT. So while this simple-minded ADS search is certainly incomplete, and being mindful that "not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted" (Gallup), an interrogation of NASA's ADS still makes interesting, if very incomplete reading. So, here are some links that you may find interesting (subject to all the caveats listed above!): WSRT publications (incl. non-refereed) over the last 40 years, identified via a simple query of the abstract field of ADS, ranked by year of publication. WSRT refereed publications over the last 40 years, identified via a simple query of the abstract field of ADS, ranked in order of the number of citations. Since older papers naturally fair better than more recent ones when it comes to accumulating citations, we also highlight: WSRT refereed publications over the last 10 years, ranked in order of the number of citations. You can also order the papers in terms of the number of citations that each article has, normalised to the number of contributing authors: WSRT refereed publications ranked in terms of normalised citations over the last 40 years - this is a good way to spot the lone researcher that sometimes prefers his or her own scientific company! The lists contain some classic WSRT related publications. The oldest refereed paper in the ADS database is Braes & Brouw (1971) and the oldest non-refereed article listed is Muller (1969). It seems that the WSRT attracts fairly small research teams/collaborations - the largest number of authors associated with a single refereed WSRT paper is only 28. Much longer author lists can probably be expected in the era of WSRT-APERTIF. In any case, no matter how you look at the various facts and figures, the WSRT has clearly been a very productive telescope over the past 40 years. By the time of the 50th anniversary, the additional citations generated via APERTIF will be the veritable icing on a large and very "lekkere" (tasty) scientific cake. |
| Copyright: | ASTRON |
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