S. Savaglio, U. Grothkopf
Swift is a satellite equipped with gamma-ray, X-ray, optical-UV instruments aiming at discovering, localizing and collecting data from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Launched end of 2004, this small-size mission finds about a hundred GRBs per year, for a total of more than 700 events as of 2012. In addition to GRBs, Swift observes other energetic events, such as AGNs, novae, and supernovae. Here we report on its success using bibliometric tools. These are the number of papers using Swift data and their impact (i.e., number of citations to those papers). We derived these for the publication years 2005 to 2011, and compared them with the same numbers for other major observatories. Swift provided data for a total of 1101 papers in the interval 2005-2011, with 24 in the first year, to 287 in the last year. In 2011, Swift more than doubled the number of publications of Subaru, it overcame Gemini by a large fraction, and reached Keck. It is getting closer to the ~400 publications of the successful high-energy missions XMM-Newton and Chandra, but is still far from the most productive telescopes VLT (over 500) and HST (almost 800). The overall average number of citations per paper, as of November 2012, is 28.3, which is comparable to the others, but lower than Keck (41.8). The science topics covered by Swift publications have changed from the first year, when over 80% of the papers were about GRBs, while in 2013 it was less than 30%.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2719
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