The Effectiveness of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope

Abstract

We have investigated the productivity and impact of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) during its twenty-year history. CFHT has maintained a database of refereed publications based on data obtained with CFHT since first light in 1979. For each paper, we analysed the cumulative number of citations and the citation counts for each year, from data supplied by the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). We have compared citation counts retrieved from the ADS with those from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for a small sample of papers. We have developed a procedure that allows us to compare citation counts between older and newer papers in order to judge their relative impact. We looked at the number of papers and citations not only by year, but also by the instrument used to obtain the data. We also provide a preliminary look as to whether programs given a higher ranking by the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) produced papers with a higher number of citations.