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F. A. Ringwald (California State University, Fresno), Rebecca L. Lovell, Sarah Abbey Kays, Yolanda V. Torres, Shawn A. Matthews (Florida Institute of Technology)
Many national and other observatories are closing small (< 3m) telescopes, to free up funding for larger telescopes. In this contribution, we present statistics of the research productivity of telescopes. These were compiled by finding articles for which new data were presented, noting which telescopes were used, and then counting the number of papers, number of pages, and other statistics. The journals used were the Astronomical Journal, the Astrophysical Journal (Letters and Supplements), and the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; we compiled citations from the Science Citation Index. This work is similar to that of Trimble (1995), except we used more recent journals and citations (1995 and 1998, respectively). We also did not restrict our sample to large telescopes only: we included all telescopes from which new data were presented, the smallest of which was a 0.1-m.
The data were gathered by freshman work-study students, who were instructed to include data for all telescopes for which they found new data were included in the journals. A by-product of this research was therefore the relative productivity of ground-based versus space telescopes, and the relative productivity of radio, infrared, X-ray, and other telescopes across the spectrum, versus optical telescopes.
We thank the Federal Work-Study program for supporting this research.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: fringwal@csufresno.edu