Trends in Astronomical Publication
and
Information Retrieval Systems

Why is it important?

The end result of most astronomical research is one or more publications in refereed astronomy or astrophysics journals, so it behooves astronomers to understand how and why we publish. Understanding the phenomenon of astronomical publication can better enable astronomers to evaluate candidates for jobs and grants and can help decide questions about the future of astronomical journals.

In addition to our research findings about astronomical publication, we developed sophisticated utilities to improve data consistency and to extract topic information from documents in databases using state-of-the-art text categorization. Astronomy is uniquely suited for this work because abstracts from a very large fraction of astronomical papers are available electronically. The browse facilities developed in this research will also be usable by researchers in other fields whose electronic databases are not so complete. Digital libraries are becoming increasingly important in science and in society as a whole, and effective access to this information hinges on consistent, high quality data and a wide variety of data retrieval tools that can efficiently access this data.

``The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of
other workers-conclusions which he cannot find the time to grasp, much less
remember, as they appear.''
--Vannevar Bush, 1945

What did we do?

I organized an interdisciplinary research group to use the NASA Astrophysics Data System database of astronomical abstracts to study a large number of trends in astronomical publication. Allison Powell and Jim French , members of the UVa Department of Computer Science , developed tools to analyze the database. Guenther Eichhorn , Michael Kurtz , and Steve Murray, of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory , supplied the database and helped identify the various selection effects that we had to take into account. I posed the questions we would like to answer and analyzed the data that Allison and Jim extracted from the database, organized the research effort, and wrote up the results.

On the database management side of things, Allison and Jim developed innovative techniques to extract information from databases in general and the ADS database in particular, and I acted as the ``domain expert,'' deciding what information is useful and making sure that the utilities were correctly extracting the necessary data.

Read a press release .
 

Refereed Publications