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Trends in Astronomical Publication Between 1975 and 1996

1997; Institute of Physics; Volume: 109; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/134008

1538-3873

Eric Schulman, J. French, A. L. T. Powell, G. Eichhorn, Michael J. Kurtz, S. S. Murray,

Historical Astronomy and Related Studies

Trends in astronomical publication have traditionally been studied by examining the few thousand papers published in a few selected journals within a few selected years. With the development of comprehensive bibliographic databases such as ADS and SIMBAD, publication trends can now be studied using tens of thousands of papers published in a number of refereed astronomy journals. The ADS has extensive bibliographic information on almost every paper published in seven major astronomy journals over the past two decades; the SIMBAD database can be used to verify critical bibliographic information such as the number of authors and the length of the papers. Here we present results of a study of astronomical publication trends using 76,000 papers published in A&A, A&AS, AJ, ApJ, ApJS, MNRAS, and PASP between 1975 and 1996. Two trends are particularly interesting: the fraction of single-author papers has decreased by about a factor of three in the last twenty years, while astronomical papers with more than fifty authors have become increasingly common since 1990.