Astrophysics Research Organizations in the 21st Century: Database and Comparative Dashboards

Abstract

As many research papers in astronomy have been written since the beginning of the 21st century as had been written previously. This exponential growth has been accompanied by substantial changes in the structure of astrophysics research, which organizations perform it and where they are located. Using data from the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System/Science Explorer (ADS/SciX) we have obtained an article number and citation based set of metrics as a function of the institutional affiliation of the first author; nearly every organization which has produced recent astronomy research is included. We use these data to examine changes in where astronomy research is being done. We demonstrate how to create custom rankings for the organizations. We develop a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPI) to examine the relative and absolute changes in the research performance for each of the 1949 organizations which have produced at least one first authored, refereed astronomy journal article since 1997. We also present KPI dashboards for 65 countries and three regions.

Figures (21)

• Figure 1: Explaining how Figure \ref{['fig:sizechange']} was created. The lines represent the degree of completeness for a single indicator (here total papers) as a function of the number of different organizations necessary to achieve that level. The four lines represent four different years(2000, red; 2007, green; 2014, yellow, and 2021 blue). The four thin, horizontal black lines represent the four completeness levels shown in Figure \ref{['fig:sizechange']}
• Figure 2: The change in the number of research organizations necessary to achieve 50% completeness for two different indictors as a function of publication year. The indicators are: Thick red:all papers; green:top 50% in terms of citation counts. The four enhanced points correspond to the four year-50% points in figure \ref{['fig:explain']}. The thin lines are linear fits to the data.
• Figure 3: The KPI dashboard for the Max Planck Gesellschaft. The four quadrants, left to right, top to bottom: Change in Influence, Change in Size, Change in Quality, and Highly Cited Papers. Described in the text.
• Figure 4: The KPI dashboard for the U. Cambridge, discription as for figure \ref{['fig:max']}
• Figure 5: The KPI dashboard for Harvard-Smithsonian, discription as for figure \ref{['fig:max']}