Scientific Impact of novel Instrumentation: the Case of MUSE
Martin M. Roth
TL;DR
The paper investigates how to quantify the scientific impact of a novel instrument using MUSE as a case study, leveraging BEPS and ADS to track 1054 refereed publications from 2014–2024. It demonstrates a systematic data-curation pipeline (telbib-derived entries, manual validation, six redshift-based categories) and reports a strong, predominantly extragalactic impact, with rapid growth culminating in MUSE becoming the most productive VLT instrument by 2020 and yielding 201 papers in 2023. The study illustrates a practical framework for assessing instrument impact through publication statistics and discusses implications for design tradeoffs and future facilities. Overall, it shows how innovative instrumentation can reshape research space and underscores the value of transparent, public bibliometric tracking for guiding instrument development.
Abstract
In the process of transforming science cases into a viable and affordable design for a novel instrument, there is the problem of how to gauge their scientific impact, especially when they end up in competing top level requirements that can be incompatible with each other. This research note presents a case study for scientific impact of the integral field spectrograph MUSE in terms of number of refereed publications from 2014 to 2024 as a figure of merit, broken down by different research areas. The analysis is based on the Basic ESO Publication Statistics service (BEPS) and NASA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS).