Mapping the sloan digital sky survey's global impact

The international collaborations associated with astronomy's Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to address fundamental challenges for assessing global S&T in a rapidly growing and globalized research field has been discussed. The SDSS survey collects multiple types of data about stars, galaxies, quasars, and other astronomical objects in the universe. The SDSS releases the survey data to the public through the SDSS SkyServer website that enable researchers and the general public to access the data directly on the Internet. The analysis focuses on two data sources that include the SkyServer's SQL query log and the bibliographic records of SDSS publications retrieved from the Web of Science. The query analysis identifies query patterns and areas of particular interest in the sky. Researchers can choose cluster labels algorithmically at different abstraction levels, from the publication titles, their indexing terms, or noun phrases extracted from their abstracts.