14 years of Spitzer publications: data use and reuse

Abstract

After 14 years of operations, the Spitzer Space Telescope has over 7800 refereed publications, which are catalogued in the Spitzer Bibliographical Database. After depleting the cryogen onboard in 2009 observatory operations were altered in order to run the mission on a budget totaling less than 1/3 that of the cryogenic mission. These changes included decreasing the number of approved science programs and funding to the community while encouraging very large programs (<1000 hours). We present here insights on how Spitzer's operational changes have altered how people publish the data, and present metrics about data use and re-usage for the entire mission in published papers. Spitzer is a community driven observatory and our observing programs vary in number of hours and number of observations depending on the science, and so a comparison between various methods of presenting publication statistics is discussed.