The success of an astronomical facility is measured by its scientific impact. A principal metric for this impact is the ensemble of peer-reviewed publications based on the observational data obtained by the facility. We present a comprehensive study of the statistics of the 4,190 refereed publications of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the period from 2012 to 2024. The publications have received 169,985 citations and are based on 2,670 ALMA projects totalling 19,265 hours of 12-m-array-equivalent observing time. Our study analyses publication statistics related to various aspects, e.g. science categories, geographical distribution, archival research, time to publication, publication fraction, and citations. We also look into the community and compare ALMA with other facilities. We find that ALMA is a high-impact observatory with an average of 41 citations per publication, ~70% of observed projects published, ~40% of publications making use of archival data in 2024, more than 9,400 unique authors, and a publication evolution following that of HST and VLT. Currently, the impact factor for ALMA publications is larger than that of all other major astronomical facilities. ALMA also plays a pivotal role in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), substantially contributing to landmark achievements such as capturing the first image of a black hole shadow.
@article{arxiv.2601.16687,
title = {ALMA publication statistics},
author = {Felix Stoehr and María Díaz Trigo and Evanthia Hatziminaoglou and Uta Grothkopf and Silvia Meakins and Leslie Kiefer and Lance Utley and Mika Konuma and Eelco van Kampen and Gergö Popping and Enrique Macias and Martin Zwaan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16687},
year = {2026}
}