Eric Schulman
NRAO
James C. French, Allison L. Powell
UVa
Stephen S. Murray, Guenther Eichhorn, Michael J. Kurtz
SAO
The sociology of astronomical publication has traditionally been studied by reading every paper published in a few selected journals during a small period of time. For example, Abt (1994, PASP, 106, 1015) looked at the number of papers published in the first thirds of 1986, 1989, and 1994 in the ApJ and the AJ as a function of whether the papers were based on ground-based observations, space-based observations, or theory. In another study, Abt (1993, PASP, 105, 794) determined institutional productivities by considering papers published in the ApJ, the AJ, and PASP in 1952, 1962, 1972, 1982, and 1992. By analyzing the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) database of astronomical abstracts within the Advanced DAta Management System (ADAMS), we can study a large number of issues in the sociology of astronomical publication over long timescales and over a large number of refereed journals. The ADS provides a wealth of astronomical data to the scientific user community in electronic form, including an abstract service that contains approximately 240,000 abstracts of astronomy and astrophysics papers. ADAMS is an object-oriented database language that supports a single shared, distributed data space that can be accessed by applications programs coded in C, C++, Fortran, or Pascal. The class hierarchy supports multiple inheritance and user-defined data types and, unlike in many object-oriented database languages, attributes in ADAMS are first class objects so schema evolution is particularly easy. We will present preliminary results which demonstrate that the use of new astronomical databases and data management systems can greatly facilitate studies that until recently were quite tedious to carry out.