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Session 17 - Data Archives & Tools.
Display session, Wednesday, January 07
Exhibit Hall,
The ADS Abstract Service is now very heavily used to read back issues of the major astronomy journals. Here we use the actual use of the ADS in September 1997 to investigate differences in the readership pattern for articles from the different journals, ApJ, AJ, Aamp;A, MNRAS for the period 1988.5 to 1995.5.
The mean readership, per paper, was 1.4 reads/month for articles between eight and nine years old, and 3 reads/month for articles between two and three years old. We examine the readership per paper, as a function of journal, normalized to the mean readership for all four journals, for each month in the time period.
The journals are not read in the same way. The AJ is read substantially more than the average with mean scores of 1.36(1.60) for the median(mean) monthly score. The scores for the other journals are: ApJ 1.09(1.09), MNRAS .939(1.02), and Aamp;A .806(.817).
The AJ and MNRAS monthly per paper readership is much more variable than for ApJ or Aamp;A, more than would be expected by root N statistics on the number of papers published in the different journals.
