ALMA Cycle 0 Publication Statistics

TL;DR

This paper presents a methodology for monitoring the scientific productivity of ALMA, analyzing its first cycle's results, and confirming its success as a transformative submillimetre observatory.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to assess ALMA's scientific impact and provides initial results from Cycle 0 demonstrating its effectiveness.

Findings

ALMA is fulfilling its promise as a transformational facility.

The methodology effectively monitors scientific productivity.

Cycle 0 results confirm the observatory's scientific impact.

Abstract

The scientific impact of a facility is the most important measure of its success. Monitoring and analysing the scientific return can help to modify and optimise operations and adapt to the changing needs of scientific research. The methodology that we have developed to monitor the scientific productivity of the ALMA Observatory, as well as the first results, are described. We focus on the outcome of the first cycle (Cycle 0) of ALMA Early Science operations. Despite the fact that only two years have passed since the completion of Cycle 0 and operations have already changed substantially, this analysisconfirms the effectiveness of the underlying concepts. We find that ALMA is fulfilling its promise as a transformational facility for the observation of the Universe in the submillimetre.