The objective of this Working Group is to evaluate aspects of the scientific performances of ESA’s Science Directorate missions through an analysis of the publication statistics and metrics and the responses to payload and observing Announcements of Opportunities (AOs). This work is timely given the statistics afforded by the 70,000 publications from the 25 ESA-led and 11 partner-led missions with, in many cases, 10-15 years of science exploitation allowing outcomes, trends and difference to be reliably investigated. We will address questions such as: “are there national research communities that are particularly successful in exploiting data from ESA’s missions? Are there particular areas of science that individual countries are good at exploiting? What fraction of papers originate from non-ESA countries such as the US and China and how do these evolve with time.” The funding for most ESA Science Programme mission payloads is provided directly by national funding agencies. We compare how these contributions compare with success at publishing the results coming from ESA’s missions.
We will investigate the outcomes of Announcements of Opportunity (AOs) for three ESA-led observatories. There is over 20 years of data on the proposal success rates of INTEGRAL and XMM-Newton (with over 10,000 XMM-Newton proposals) as well as the results of three Herschel AOs and the evolution of the proposing community is clearly evident in the long-lived mission AOs. HST observed a male bias in the AO success rates leading to HST (and other missions/facilities) adopting “double-blind” proposal selection processes. We have determined proposers’ genders for the ESA-led missions and will examine whether the same bias is evident. We also compiled information on the gender of TAC members and chairs to examine how this evolves in time and whether this is correlated with proposal success rates.