The Impact of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey on Astronomical

We investigate the influence of culture and identity (geographic location) on the constitution of a specific research field. Using as case study the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) project in the Astronomy field, we analyzed texts from bibliographic records of publications along three cultural and geographic axes: US only publications, non-US publications and international collaboration. Using three text mining systems (CiteSpace, TermWatch and PEx), we were able to automatically identify the topics specific to each cultural and geographic region as well as isolate the core research topics common to all geographic zones. The results tended to show that US-only and non-US research in this field shared more commonalities with international collaboration than with one another, thus indicating that the former two (US-only and non-US) research focused on rather distinct topics.