Identifying Telescope Usage in Astrophysics Publications: A Machine Learning Framework for Institutional Research Management at Observatories

• Published in: The Astronomical journal 2025-01, Vol.169 (1), p.42
• Main Authors: Amado Olivo, Vicente, Kerzendorf, Wolfgang, Cherinka, Brian, Shields, Joshua V., Didier, Annie, von der Wense, Katharina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astrophysics; Classification; Documents; Machine learning; Observatories; Open source software; Queries; Random Forests; Research management; Space telescopes; Support vector machine; Support vector machines
• ISSN: 0004-6256; 1538-3881
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad9026

Large scientific institutions, such as the Space Telescope Science Institute, track the usage of their facilities to understand the needs of the research community. Astrophysicists incorporate facility usage data into their scientific publications, embedding this information in plain text. Traditional automatic search queries prove unreliable for accurate tracking due to the misidentification of facility names in plain text. As automatic search queries fail, researchers are required to manually classify publications for facility usage, which consumes valuable research time. In this work, we introduce a machine learning classification framework for the automatic identification of facility usage of observation sections in astrophysics publications. Our framework identifies sentences containing telescope mission keywords (e.g., Kepler and TESS) in each publication. Subsequently, the identified sentences are transformed using term frequency–inverse document frequency and classified with a support vector machine. The classification framework leverages the context surrounding the identified telescope mission keywords to provide relevant information to the classifier. The framework successfully classifies the usage of MAST-hosted missions with a 92.9% accuracy. Furthermore, our framework demonstrates robustness when compared to other approaches, considering common metrics and computational complexity. The framework’s interpretability makes it adaptable for use across observatories and other scientific facilities worldwide.