UKIRT Publication Count Policy

UKIRT Publication Count Policy

This policy describes the criteria for inclusion of papers in the annual UKIRT publication count. It is based on the principle that UKIRT as a provider of data, rather than results. Therefore data can be counted more than once whereas derived results cannot.

To qualify as a UKIRT publication, a paper must base some or all of its conclusions on UKIRT data. These may be (i) original data obtained by the authors, (ii) archival data reduced or analyzed anew by the authors, or (iii) calibrated data (e.g. JHK photometry) already published elsewhere but employed anew for a different purpose.

The following two lists describe examples of “marginal” papers.

Excluded:

  1. Second hand use: papers quoting/using derived results (e.g. a SED slope) from other papers which use UKIRT data. Those data have already been published but the fundamental problem is that no new analysis of the data themselves is involved.
  2. Papers in which an object discovered by UKIRT (and e.g. bearing a UKIRT designation such as ULASx), and published elsewhere, is then followed up with some other facility. This will probably mean that some papers claimed as UKIDSS achievements will fail the test as UKIRT papers.
  3. Standard stars:  papers which use the published standard star magnitudes for calibration purposes only.

Not excluded:

  1. Small contributions of UKIRT data by comparison to other data sets in the paper. If UKIRT spends an hour getting a photometric point which is one of (say) 50 employed in a paper, it is still valid as long as it is not a re-publication. An example of this is the Tonry et al. supernova paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003ApJ…594….1T
  2. New usage of data (e.g. photometric points) in an unrelated paper; for example, if a paper quotes JHK photometry and is referenced by another paper which uses those points for a new purpose, then effectively the data have been obtained from an archive and should be counted.
  3. Use of UKIRT data for other than directly science-related purposes. For example, if a paper uses a set of UKIDSS photometry from the science archive as a check on calibration of its own photometry, that is still a valid, “from scratch” use of UKIRT data and should be counted.