AN ASSESSMENT OF RESEARCH DONE AT THE NATIONAL OPTICAL OBSERVATORIES

We know that the national optical observatories produce hundreds of papers yearly but we wonder whether these include a reasonable share of major studies because some practices at those observatories, especially before 1982, seemed to be biased against major long-term studies. We considered the papers published in 1980 and 1981 and based on data obtained primarily from four large telescopes, two at national and two at university observatories. The former telescopes produce more papers, but are they as useful to astronomy as judged by citation counts? There is statistically no significant differences in the average citations per paper for the four telescopes and the 5% most-cited papers came from all four telescopes in statistically equal numbers.