How much does Europe contribute to astronomy's golden age?

European Review

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 3-16

  Habing, Harm ^a  

^a LEIDEN UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASTRONOMY; EUROPEAN UNION; KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEM; RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT;

EID: 33846039091     PISSN: 10627987     EISSN: 14740575     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1062798707000026     Document Type: Article

References (3)

1. By comparison: The Sun and its planets are now 4.7 billion years old.
2. This conclusion invokes the question why one should publish an article in a refereed journal after it has been made public already? Why go through all the extra effort? The reply is that the refereeing process adds significant value to a paper. Manuscripts in the preprint database that never appear in print are rarely worth being remembered.
3. So far the production rate of different countries has been compared to the total population of each country. The number of active astronomers in a country, however, varies considerably from country to country. Taking the individual members of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) as the number of active astronomers the UK has 13.4 astronomers per 1 million inhabitants whereas for Germany this number is 5.9. Calculating the number of articles published in the first three months of 2002 per member of the IAU I found 0.22 for the UK, 0.20 for Germany, 0.18 for the Netherlands, 0.15 for both France and Italy, 0.12 for Spain and 0.09 for Poland. Again the UK leads the list but Germany is now close. A quite significant contrast consists between the UK and Germany on one side and France and Italy on the other but the contrast is smaller than before. The USA has 2246 IAU members; this leads to a production rate of 0.23 papers per IAU member. The last number may be an upper limit, because IAU membership does not seem to be as widespread in the USA as it is in Europe.