ALMA Publication Statistics

ALMA has analysed the refereed ALMA publications in the period from 2012 to 2024.

The study analyses publication statistics related to various aspects, e.g., science categories, geographical distribution, archival research, time to publication, publication fraction, and citations. Among other results, the analysis shows that ~70% of observed projects were used in at least one publication, and ALMA publications so far were written by more than 9400 unique authors. The median time to first publication since data delivery is 2.1 years, and ~40% of publications made use of archival data in 2024.

The publication evolution follows that of other high impact observatories as the Hubble Space Telescope and Very Large Telescope. In 2024, the impact factor for ALMA publications, defined as the total number of citations received in a given year stemming from publications of the previous two years, is larger than that of all other major astronomical facilities.

The full publication (Stoehr et al. 2026, PASP) can be found here.