Trends of Papers Published from 2006 to 2010 in Journals Nature and Science

TL;DR

This study analyzes publication trends in Nature and Science from 2006 to 2010, focusing on astronomy papers, their sub-fields, facilities used, and Korean contributions, revealing distribution patterns and research focus areas.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantitative analysis of publication patterns in top journals, highlighting the distribution of astronomy research and international contributions over five years.

Findings

544 astronomy papers, 7.0% of all research papers

Ground-based telescopes and spacecrafts are primary observational tools

Korean scientists contributed 86 papers, 1.10% of total

Abstract

We present an analysis of the papers published in the journals Nature and Science in the years from 2006 to 2010. During this period, a total of 7788 papers were published in the two journals. This includes 544 astronomy papers that comprise 7.0% of the papers in `all' research fields and 18.9% of those in the fields of `physical sciences'. The sub-fields of research of the astronomy papers are distributed, in descending order of number of papers, in Solar System, stellar astronomy, galaxies and the universe, the Milky Way Galaxy, and exoplanets. The observational facilities used for the studies are mainly ground-based telescopes (31.1%), spacecrafts (27.0%), and space telescopes (22.8%), while 16.0% of papers did not use any noticeable facilities and 1.7% used other facilities. Korean scientists have published 86 papers (33 in Nature and 53 in Science), which is 1.10% of all the papers (N=7788) in the two journals. The share of papers by Korean astronomers among the scientific papers by Koreans is 8.14%, slightly higher than the contribution of astronomy papers (7.0%) in both journals.