HelioIndex: A Directory of Active Researchers in Solar and Heliospheric Physics

TL;DR

HelioIndex is a comprehensive, automatically maintained directory of active solar and heliospheric physics researchers, including publication and citation data, derived from ORCID and publication databases, covering over 1900 authors worldwide.

Contribution

This work introduces HelioIndex, a novel automated directory of SHP researchers that integrates multiple data sources to provide detailed author and publication metrics.

Findings

Contains 1910 researchers from 55 countries.

Authors average 0.69 first-author papers per year.

Median paper citations are 15.

Abstract

HelioIndex is a directory of authors who are active in solar and heliospheric physics (SHP). It is available at the webpage HelioIndex.org, and it includes several derived products such as publication lists, country and institute data, journal data, and lists of the most cited articles in the field. HelioIndex is built from ORCID identifiers and publication data obtained from the Astrophysics Data System and ORCID. Selection criteria have been chosen to approximately correspond to a researcher having completed a PhD and published original research in a refereed journal. HelioIndex is intended to be a comprehensive directory of SHP authors that is generated and maintained through software procedures, with minimal human intervention. At the time of writing, 1910 SHP researchers are listed in HelioIndex and they belong to 55 countries. The countries with the largest numbers of researchers are the US, China and the UK, with 29%, 15%, and 8% of the total, respectively. HelioIndex authors average 0.69 first author papers per year over their careers, and the median citations for a paper is 15. Based on journal keyword data, it is estimated that 57% and 28% of HelioIndex authors belong to solar physics and heliospheric physics, respectively, with the remainder overlapping both disciplines.