Astrophysics Research Organizations in the 21st Century: Database and Comparative Dashboards

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive database and interactive dashboards analyzing the evolution, distribution, and performance of astrophysics research organizations and countries since 1997, based on citation and article metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a new database and KPI dashboards for comparing research output and impact across organizations and regions in astrophysics.

Findings

Identification of key research organizations and their growth trends

Development of customizable rankings for institutions

Insights into regional research performance differences

Abstract

As many research papers in astronomy have been written since the beginning of the 21st century as had been written previously. This exponential growth has been accompanied by substantial changes in the structure of astrophysics research, which organizations perform it and where they are located. Using data from the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System/Science Explorer (ADS/SciX) we have obtained an article number and citation based set of metrics as a function of the institutional affiliation of the first author; nearly every organization which has produced recent astronomy research is included. We use these data to examine changes in where astronomy research is being done. We demonstrate how to create custom rankings for the organizations. We develop a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPI) to examine the relative and absolute changes in the research performance for each of the 1949 organizations which have produced at least one first authored, refereed astronomy journal article since 1997. We also present KPI dashboards for 65 countries and three regions.