By Stuart Ryder
[email protected]
As part of AAL’s role in assisting the Dept of Industry, Science and Resources in managing Australia’s Strategic Partnership with ESO, we monitor not just the proposal submissions and allocations but also any refereed publications involving Australian-based astronomers that use data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) or Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). While ESO tracks all such publications itself through telbib, it does not distinguish them by author affiliation. Instead AAL uses a bibliography database developed by Astralis-AAO that checks the NASA ADS on a regular basis for all new papers that appear to use ESO data with 1 or more Australian-based authors. These are checked manually by AAL staff to ensure these papers contain genuine new results or analyses from ESO instruments, and are not just (say) citing results/surveys or referring to current or future ESO instruments. The results are then made available publicly as ADS Libraries, and updated on a regular basis.
There are currently 2 ADS Libraries that can be accessed from the Statistics page of AAL’s ESO Forum:
As of mid-Oct 2022, the first list contains 37 papers, of which ~20% are published in the most prestigious journals Nature and Science. The second list contains over 900 papers, about 1/3 of which have been since the start of Australia’s Strategic Partnership with ESO in mid-2017.
Michael Murphy is the Australian representative on the ESO Science Technical Committee. Contact: [email protected]
Sarah Sweet is the Australian representative on the ESO Users Committee. Contact: [email protected]
Stuart Ryder is a Program Manager with AAL. Contact: [email protected]
Guest posts are also welcome – please submit these to [email protected]
