ESA Science Programme Missions: Contributions and Exploitation – ESA Mission Publications

We examine over 68,000 refereed publications based on data from 25 missions in the ESA Science Programme and 11 additional missions in which ESA is involved as a junior partner. The publications cover the fields of astronomy, planetary science, and heliophysics and are spread over almost 50 years, spanning the period between the year a mission was launched and the end of 2021. We study the number of papers as a function of time and the evolution of several metrics, including citations and other indices. We also investigate the geographical distribution of the authors, and for ESA Member States we correlate the various indices with the level of financial contribution of the individual countries to the ESA Science Programme. We find that in general the involvement of the scientific communities in the various Member States follows the distribution expected from the countries' gross domestic products, with communities in some field and countries, both large and small, being particularly effective at turning data into scientific discoveries. We also analyse the differences between papers written by investigators directly involved in the provision of the payloads or in the definition of the scientific projects and those written by other scientists not directly involved in the process. We find that the latter, the so-called "archival papers", represent more than 50 % of the literature based on data from ESA Space Science missions, and have a similar impact on the literature in the respective fields, as judged by the number of citations. This highlights the importance of sharing and preserving the scientific data produced by the missions.