Astronomers and the Science Citation Index, 1981--1997

Abstract

The Institute for Science Information (ISI) has generated two lists of citation information for astronomers that are uniquely restricted both as to the years surveyed for the cited papers, and the years surveyed for the citing papers. The main list gives citation data for 62,813 physicists and astronomers whose journal papers were cited 100 times or more from 1981.0 to 1997.5 by papers published during the same time interval. The second list gives the 200 most-cited papers/year published in refereed astronomical journals from 1981-1996, as cited in papers in those same journals from 1981.0-1998.0. Astronomer names were selected from various sources. From this work an Astronomy Citation Database (ACD) has been constructed, containing citation data for 6458+ astronomers, plus additional data for 173 astronomers and the top-10 cited papers published 1981-1996. Various problems, both substantial and subtle, of producing a reasonably fair citation database are detailed. Chief among these are whether to assign either parital or full credit for each author on a given paper. Whether one is honored with one of the top astronomy lifetime-awards is a strong function of how well your work stands out as your own, and in what kind of publications you publish (e.g., the ISI does not keep track of papers in meeting proceedings/books/catalogs). Name confusion affects this kind of analysis to the extent that that it would take an enormous effort to disentangle its effects and, even then, not all name confusion would be settled. A ``modest proposal'' is made that our professional field (and others) go to a system of uniquely associating an identification number to each author on each paper to solve the name confusion problem.