Citations and impact of Dutch astronomy

Abstract

The aim of this study is to make a bibliometric comparison of the performance of research astronomers in the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) with astronomers elsewhere by using the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). We use various indices for bibliometric performance for a sample of NOVA astronomers to compare to samples of astronomers worldwide, and from the United States. We give much weight to normalising bibliometric measures by number of authors, and number of years since first publication. In particular we calculate the `Hirsh-index' normalized to number of authors and for first-author papers. Secondly, we consider the results of the 'Nederlands Observatorium van Wetenschap en Technologie' (NOWT; Netherlands Observatory of Science and Technology), which regularly publishes a report 'Science and Technology Indicators'. We reproduce those results using publication lists from institutions in the Netherlands, again using ADS, and examine and discuss the conclusions and indications in these reports. We find that the NOVA researchers perform much better in bibliometric measures than samples drawn from IAU or AAS membership lists. A more suitable comparison is one with the (tenured) staff of the top-15 US institutions and there the NOVA staff performs in these respects as good or almost as good as that of American top institutes. From a citation analysis through the use of ADS we conclude that the impact ratio of Dutch astronomical publications is rising which is opposite to what is reported by NOWT. This difference is most likely caused by a better separation of astronomy and physics in ADS than in World of Knowledge. ADS probably finds more citations in conference proceedings, while the inclusion of citations to articles with their pre-print identifier could also help explain the difference (especially since the citation windows in the reports are short).