Related papers: The uniqueness of observatory publications
For decades, perhaps even centuries, the exchange of publications between observatories was the most important source of information on new astronomical results, either in the form of observational data or new scientific theories. In…
I review some of the past and current methods for retrieval of literature and other published information, excluding commercial services. Much of this is a personal view and based on experience made at various institutions, some of them…
As a scientific discipline, Astronomy is rather unique. We only have one laboratory, the Universe, and we cannot, of course, change the initial conditions and study the resulting effects. On top of this, acquiring Astronomical data has…
Observatory libraries traditionally have maintained databases of publications resulting from usage of their facilities. In the era of electronic publication, the methodology of the creation of these databases has perforce changed as well.…
Operation of the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory shares some issues with modern physical observatories, e.g., intimidating data volumes and rapid technological change, and must also address unique concerns like the lack of direct…
Observatories need to measure and evaluate the scientific output and overall impact of their facilities. An observatory bibliography consists of the papers published using that observatory's data, typically gathered by searching the major…
The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of…
The amount of data produced by large observational facilities and space missions has led to the archiving and on-line accessibility of much of this data, available to the entire astronomical community. This allows a much wider…
Observatories, Institutes and Centers that support major astronomical facilities have, for decades, played a key role in maximizing the scientific return from their facilities and telescopes. It is crucial to realize that an "observatory"…
During recent years, bibliometric studies have become increasingly important in evaluating individual scientists, institutes, and entire observatories. In astronomy, often librarians are involved in maintaining publication databases and…
The challenges of multi-wavelength astrophysics require new outlooks from those appropriate to traditional astronomy. The next generation of research scientists must be trained to exploit the potentiality now being provided for the first…
Whilst astronomy as a science is historically founded on observations at optical wavelengths, studying the Universe in other bands has yielded remarkable discoveries, from pulsars in the radio, signatures of the Big Bang at submm…
The virtual observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperable data archives, tools and applications that together form an environment in which original astronomical research can be carried out. The VO is opening up new ways of exploiting…
In this paper we present a first large-scale analysis of the relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents bibliographic characteristics. A data set of 1.3 million publications from different fields…
This brief research report analyzes the availability of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) worldwide, highlighting the dominance of large publishing houses and the need for unique persistent identifiers to increase the visibility of…
Space observatories are having major impacts on our knowledge of the Universe, from the Solar neighborhood to the cosmological background, opening many new windows out of reach to ground-based observatories. Celestial objects emit all over…
Astronomy is entering a new era as multiple, large area, digital sky surveys are in production. The resulting datasets are truly remarkable in their own right; however, a revolutionary step arises in the aggregation of complimentary…
The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers (a collaboration dubbed URANIA), has developed a distributed on-line digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search,…
This work addresses the development of the astronomical observatory all through history, from an architectural point of view, as a building in relation to the observing instruments and their functioning as a heterogeneous work center. We…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…