The impact of archival papers based on data from ESA space science missions

The Directorate of Science of the European Space Agency (ESA) monitors all published refereed articles based on data from the ESA science missions. To better characterise the scientific return of the missions and of their archives, we are conducting an investigation of the fraction and impact of “archival papers”, namely papers based on data from ESA missions written by authors who were not involved in providing the on-board instrumentation on those missions or who did not propose to request the data on which those papers are based. I will report on a preliminary analysis of the publications in the last 20 years for a representative sample of missions, showing that archival papers account for the largest fraction of them. This result is common to all areas of space science (Astronomy, Heliophysics, Planetary Science). Typically, archival papers start to outnumber non-archival papers about 8±5 years after the first data become available. The impact of archival papers, measured by the number of refereed citations to them, exceeds that of non-archival papers: the number of archival papers is larger and the average number of citations per paper is comparable. I will also illustrate the machine-learning tools that are being developed to assist in the process of identifying and classifying papers in the scientific literature that make use of data from ESA space science missions.