Abstract
The bibliographic science papers with high citations rates are often used as an indication of the science impact of an observatory. These high impact papers are presented as examples of the best science being done with an observatory’s data. But, is the number of citations by itself a good indicator of the scientific impact of the paper, and is impact a good indicator of the scientific impact of the observatory? In this paper we will present results from a recent study of Chandra high impact papers and suggest some alternative methods for identifying such papers. This work has been supported by NASA under contract NAS 8-03060 to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for operation of the Chandra X-ray Center.
Highlights
Observatory science papers with high citations rates are often used by observatories as an indication of the science impact of an observatory
There are two caveats associated with the objective measures: 1) they may change as the observatory ages, so one must decide what to do about High Impact Papers (HIPs) that no longer meet the current criteria and 2) they need to be determined in a programmatic way without requiring further analysis by curators
Based on citation distributions of Chandra Science Papers (CSPs) we identified four categories for identifying potential HIPs and that two of those categories allow us to identify High Impact Papers much earlier than using the total count of citations
Summary
Observatory science papers with high citations rates are often used by observatories as an indication of the science impact of an observatory. The papers with the highest number of citations are deemed High Impact Papers (HIPs). One reason for identifying HIPs is that High Impact Papers may tell us something about the most influential types of science coming from the observatory and what sorts of observing programs will have long-lasting contributions to astronomy. Since it often takes many years for papers to reach the HIP category, we hope to identify objective measures which will allow us to identify High Impact Papers earlier to perhaps provide guidance in the request for proposals process
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