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Register a new userSwift publication statistics: a comparison with other major observatories
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Swift is a satellite equipped with gamma-ray, X-ray, and optical-UV instruments aimed at discovering, localizing and collecting data from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Launched at the end of 2004, this small-size mission finds about a hundred GRBs per year, totaling more than 700 events as of 2012. In addition to GRBs, Swift observes other energetic events, such as AGNs, novae, and supernovae. Here we look at its success using bibliometric tools; that is the number of papers using Swift data and their impact (i.e., number of citations to those papers). We derived these for the publication years 2005 to 2011, and compared them with the same numbers for other major observatories. Swift provided data for 1101 papers in the interval 2005-2011, with 24 in the first year, to 287 in the last year. In 2011, Swift had more than double the number of publications as Subaru, it overcame Gemini by a large fraction, and reached Keck. It is getting closer to the ~400 publications of the successful high-energy missions XMM-Newton and Chandra, but is still far from the most productive telescopes VLT (over 500) and HST (almost 800). The overall average number of citations per paper, as of November 2012, is 28.3, which is comparable to the others, but lower than Keck (41.8). The science topics covered by Swift publications have changed from the first year, when over 80% of the papers were about GRBs, while in 2011 it was less than 30%.
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The professional literature provides one means to review the evolution and geographic distribution of the scientific communities engaged in solar and heliospheric physics. With help of the Astrophysics Data System (NASA/ADS), I trace the growth of the research community over the past century from a few dozen researchers early in the 20-th Century to over 4,000 names with over refereed 2,000 publications in recent years, with 90% originating from 20 countries, being published in 90 distinct journals. Overall, the lead authors of these publications have their affiliations for 45% in Europe, 29% in the Americas, 24% in Australasia, and 2% in Africa and Arab countries. Publications most frequently appear (in decreasing order) in the Astrophysical Journal, the Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics), Solar Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Advances in Space Research (adding up to 59% of all publications in 2015).
In the current view of Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) phenomena, an emission component extending up to the very-high energy (VHE, E > 30 GeV) domain is though to be a relatively common feature at least in the brightest events. This leads to an unexpected richness of possible theoretical models able to describe such phenomenology. Hints of emission at tens of GeV are indeed known since the EGRET observations during the 90s and confirmed in the Fermi-LAT data. However, our comprehension of these phenomena is still far to be satisfactory. In this respect, the VHE characterization of GRBs may constitute a breakthrough for understanding their physics and, possibly, for providing decisive clues for the discrimination among different proposed emission mechanisms, which are barely distinguishable at lower energies. The current generation of Cherenkov observatories, such as the MAGIC telescopes, have opened the possibility to extend the measurement of GRB emission, and in general to any short time-scale transient phenomena, fromfew tens of GeV up to the TeV energy range, with a higher sensitivity with respect to gamma-ray space-based instruments. In the near future, a crucial role for the VHE observations of GRBs will be played by the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), thanks to its about one order of magnitude better sensitivity and lower energy threshold with respect to current instruments. In this contribution, we present a method aimed at providing VHE detection prospects for observations of GRB-like transient events with Cherenkov telescopes. In particular, we consider the observation of the transient event GRB 090102 as a test case for the method and show the achieved detection prospects under different observational conditions for the MAGIC telescopes and CTA.
Optical long baseline interferometry is a technique that has generated almost 850 refereed papers to date. The targets span a large variety of objects from planetary systems to extragalactic studies and all branches of stellar physics. We have created a database hosted by the JMMC and connected to the Optical Long Baseline Interferometry Newsletter (OLBIN) web site using MySQL and a collection of XML or PHP scripts in order to store and classify these publications. Each entry is defined by its ADS bibcode, includes basic ADS informations and metadata. The metadata are specified by tags sorted in categories: interferometric facilities, instrumentation, wavelength of operation, spectral resolution, type of measurement, target type, and paper category, for example. The whole OLBIN publication list has been processed and we present how the database is organized and can be accessed. We use this tool to generate statistical plots of interest for the community in optical long baseline interferometry.
We describe Cal X-1, a SmallSat mission concept to establish X-ray standard candles in the sky, which will enable absolute calibration of the current and future X-ray observatories. It consists of two CubeSats flying in formation, one containing an absolutely calibrated X-ray source and another, 1-2 km away, a simple X-ray telescope.
We present proper motions for 15 pulsars which are observed regularly by the Nanshan 25-m radio telescope. Two methods, the frequentist method (Coles et al.2011) and the Bayesian (Lentati et al. 2014) method, are used and the results are compared. We demonstrate that the two methods can be applied to young pulsar data sets that exhibit large amounts of timing noise with steep spectral exponents and give consistent results. The measured positions also agree with very-long-baseline interferometric positions. Proper motions for four pulsars are obtained for the first time, and improved values are obtained for five pulsars.
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