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About this Article

MAST Staff

The Impact of the MAST Data Archive (pre-print)

MAST's Impact

Here are the key takeaways from our paper:

  • A modest investment in archiving data has an outsized impact and continues to return dividends for decades. One clear example of this is IUE, which continues to have a nearly-steady citation rate, despite being decommissioned in 1996. See the first image in the right ("Figure 7") for the specifics.
  • For active missions, long-term archiving of data multiplies the science impact. MAST defines a paper as "archival" when there is no overlap between paper co-authors and the initial General Observer (GO) proposal team; after only 8 years of operations, the majority of HST papers published each year were (at least in part) archival. After 3 years, JWST is already at a ratio of 1:2 (archival:GO) for published papers. See "Figure 9" at right for a more complete picture.
  • We believe our findings generalize beyond MAST and beyond astronomy. Well-funded archives with a long-term mission to make data accessible to everyone can reap the same benefits.

About the Paper

This publication is the culmination of decades of work by MAST staff. Collectively, we've analyzed 37,000 papers published in 40 journals over the last 50 years. Thank an archivist! Interested in learning more about how we performed this analysis? Check out the pre-print.

two graphs, both showing the citations per year. the top graph contains a breakdown of "non-flagship" (i.e. not HST or JWST), while the bottom compares non-flagship to flagship. both graphs show an exponential increase from 1980 to now
Figure 7 from the paper, showing the number of citations each year for MAST missions. Of particular interest is the non-flagship International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), which ceased operations in 1996. Citations plateaued at ~9000 per year around this time. 30 years later, the citation rate has barely decreased; a clear indicator that missions can continue to have meaningful impacts when archives remain committed to data accessibility.

 

JWST and HST papers by author category
Figure 9
Number of papers published per year that analyzed HST (lighter shades) and JWST (darker shades, at right) data by author category. See legend: “None” means the author category could not be determined while "Part" means a partial archival paper (using a combination of GO and archival). This split-from-zero plot shows the number of papers authored by the original investigating team (GO) on the lower (below zero) y−axis.

 

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