Felix Stoehr

The success of an astronomical facility is measured by its scientific impact. A principal metric for this impact is the ensemble of peer-reviewed publications based on the observational data obtained by the facility. We present a comprehensive study of the statistics of the 4190 refereed publications of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the period from 2012 to 2024. The publications have received 169,985 citations and are based on 2670 ALMA projects totalling 19,265 hr of 12 m-array-equivalent observing time. Our study analyses publication statistics related to various aspects, e.g., science categories, geographical distribution, archival research, time to publication, publication fraction, and citations. We also look into the community and compare ALMA with other facilities. We find that ALMA is a high-impact observatory with ∼70% of observed projects published, ∼40% of publications making use of archival data in 2024, more than 9400 unique authors, and a publication evolution following that of HST and VLT. Currently, the impact factor for ALMA publications is larger than that of all other major astronomical facilities. ALMA also plays a pivotal role in very long baseline interferometry, substantially contributing to landmark achievements such as capturing the first image of a black hole shadow.

The success of an astronomical facility is measured by its scientific impact. A principal metric for this impact is the ensemble of peer-reviewed publications based on the observational data obtained by the facility. We present a comprehensive study of the statistics of the 4,190 refereed publications of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the period from 2012 to 2024. The publications have received 169,985 citations and are based on 2,670 ALMA projects totalling 19,265 hours of 12-m-array-equivalent observing time. Our study analyses publication statistics related to various aspects, e.g. science categories, geographical distribution, archival research, time to publication, publication fraction, and citations. We also look into the community and compare ALMA with other facilities. We find that ALMA is a high-impact observatory with an average of 41 citations per publication, ~70% of observed projects published, ~40% of publications making use of archival data in 2024, more than 9,400 unique authors, and a publication evolution following that of HST and VLT. Currently, the impact factor for ALMA publications is larger than that of all other major astronomical facilities. ALMA also plays a pivotal role in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), substantially contributing to landmark achievements such as capturing the first image of a black hole shadow.

An ESO internal ALMA development study, BRAIN, is addressing the ill-posed inverse problem of synthesis image analysis, employing astrostatistics and astroinformatics. These emerging fields of research offer interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of observational astronomy, statistics, algorithm development, and data science. In this study, we provide evidence of the benefits of employing these approaches to ALMA imaging for operational and scientific purposes. We show the potential of two techniques, RESOLVE and DeepFocus, applied to ALMA-calibrated science data. Significant advantages are provided with the prospect to improve the quality and completeness of the data products stored in the science archive and the overall processing time for operations. Both approaches evidence the logical pathway to address the incoming revolution in data rates dictated by the planned electronic upgrades. Moreover, we bring to the community additional products through a new package, ALMASim, to promote advancements in these fields, providing a refined ALMA simulator usable by a large community for training and testing new algorithms.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is nearing its phase of full operations. ALMA will collect about 200TB/year of astronomical data which will be reduced by an automatic pipeline and turned into fully calibrated science-ready data products. We present design choices, challenges and solutions from data capturing over data reduction and data distribution to archival research, that allow to deal with the large amounts of data and, hopefully, achieve the maximum amount of science return.