Astronomers and the Science Citation Index , 1981 – 1997

The Institute for Science Information (ISI) has generated two lists of citation information for astronomers that are restricted both as to the years surveyed for the cited papers, and the years surveyed for the citing papers. These databases are unique among the electronically-available citation data in their restrictions of both citing and cited years. The main list (P&A-100) gives citation data for 62,813 physicists and astronomers whose journal papers were cited 100 times or more from 1981.0 to 1997.5 by papers published during the same time interval. The second list (AST-top-papers) gives the 200 most-cited papers/year published in refereed astronomical journals from 1981–1996, as cited in papers in those same journals from 1981.0 to 1998.0. Astronomer names were selected from those given in the P&A-100 list using various sources, including the 1998 AAS Membership Directory, the names from the AST-top-papers list, the list of astronomers honored by the AAS, National Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Prize Committee, and the knowledge of this writer. From this work an Astronomy Citation Database has been constructed, containing citation data for 6331+ astronomers. Various problems, both substantial and subtle, of producing a reasonably fair citation database from either the data supplied by the ISI to this author, or from the Web, are detailed. Chief among these are whether to assign either parital or full credit for each author on a given paper. Whether one is honored with one of the top lifetime-awards given to astronomers is a strong function of how well your work stands out as your own. In particular, we can negatively impact our citation statistics in two ways. First, because the ISI does not keep track of meeting proceedings/books/catalogs, per se, we do not get citation credit for meeting papers/books/catalogs in the ISI lists. Second, if we fuzz our identities on the papers, such as publishing papers with two or more first initials or through confusion with the names of other astronomers/physicists. Name confusion affects this kind of analysis to the extent that that it would take an enormous effort to disentangle its effects and, even, then, not all name confusion would be settled. If sociologists, science historians and others (ourselves included?) feel that solving the name confusion problem is worthwhile, perhaps we, as a professional society, should take appropriate steps. A “modest proposal” is made that our professional field (and others) go to a system of uniquely associating an identification number to each author on each paper.