Hot papers in astronomy and astrophysics

The table above lists the 10 most-cited recent journal articles in astronomy and astrophysics. All were published between early 2009 and early 2011. Thomson Reuters designates as "hot papers" any papers published in the past two years that rank in the top 0.1 per cent of their field by citations, as these do. Of course, older papers will have had more time to collect citations than more recent ones. Thus, of the 10 hot papers listed here, seven appeared in 2009, two in 2010 and one in 2011. That a 2011 paper turns up at all is remarkable. In a scant three months, the paper ranked seventh has already racked up 139 citations.

The top-ranked paper, with more than 400 citations, reports the seventh data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Simon Mitton, columnist for Thomson Reuters' Science Watch newsletter, calls the SDSS "the most ambitious optical survey of the sky in the history of astronomy" (see http://www.sdss.org). The SDSS uses a 2.5m telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to map the structure of the Universe and provide detailed data to explain how that structure arose. Astronomers studying many different phenomena draw profitably on these data. The SDSS, Dr Mitton notes, "has, in a decade, spawned about 2,200 papers that use its data as a primary source, and [these] have accumulated some 70,000 citations" (see Science Watch, 21(5): 6, September/October 2010, http://sciencewatch.com/ana/hot/phy/10sepoct-phy).

The 2011 paper in the list summarises seven-year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission (see http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov). Lead author Eiichiro Komatsu, director of the Texas Cosmology Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has observed, regarding the earlier version of this paper that reported on five-year data, that "the observational data of temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation, obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, still maintains its position as a prime source of information for cosmologists...Demands and appetite for better data and some observational guidance as to which directions to take next are always very high in the area of cosmology. I think that such high demands from the cosmology community are reflected in the citation counts." (See http://sciencewatch.com/dr/fbp/2009/09octfbp/09octfbpKoma.)

For an analysis of top-cited papers in astronomy and astrophysics over the past decade, published between 2000 and 2009, see http://www.sciencewatch.com/ana/fea/11janfebFea

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