Monthly Notices is one of the three largest general primary astronomical research publications. It is an international journal, published by the Royal Astronomical Society. This article 1 describes its publication policy and practice.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

where A represents the magnetic vector potential, is an integral of the hydromagnetic equations. This -integral made it possible to formulate a variational principle for the force-free magnetic fields. The integral expresses the fact that motions cannot transform a given field in an entirely arbitrary different field, if the conductivity of the medium isconsidered infinite. In this paper we shall show that the full set of hydromagnetic equations admit five more integrals, besides the energy integral, if dissipative processes are absent. These integrals, as we shall presently verify, are I2 =fbHvdV, (2)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Recently NAFU SA and other role players expressed some criticism about government programmes. The criticism was not so much about the objectives and content of these programmes, but rather about their accessibility, or lack thereof, to emerging farmers.

What about the messenger

In the early 1960s, astronomers were puzzled by quasars — sources of intense radio emission that seemed to be stars, but had unintelligible optical spectra. In 1963, Maarten Schmidt solved the puzzle by recognizing the Balmer lines of hydrogen, strongly redshifted, in the spectrum of the quasar 3C 273. Schmidt reached the "most direct and least objectionable" conclusion, that 3C 273 was no star, but the enormously bright nucleus of a distant galaxy.

3C 273: A Star-like Object with Large Red-Shift

Women comprise a minority of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. Quantifying the gender gap may identify fields that will not reach parity without intervention, reveal underappreciated biases, and inform benchmarks for gender balance among conference speakers, editors, and hiring committees. Using the PubMed and arXiv databases, we estimated the gender of 36 million authors from >100 countries publishing in >6000 journals, covering most STEMM disciplines over the last 15 years, and made a web app allowing easy access to the data (https://lukeholman.github.io/genderGap/). Despite recent progress, the gender gap appears likely to persist for generations, particularly in surgery, computer science, physics, and maths. The gap is especially large in authorship positions associated with seniority, and prestigious journals have fewer women authors. Additionally, we estimate that men are invited by journals to submit papers at approximately double the rate of women. Wealthy countries, notably Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, had fewer women authors than poorer ones. We conclude that the STEMM gender gap will not close without further reforms in education, mentoring, and academic publishing.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2004956&type=printable

The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?

Numerous studies across different research fields have shown that both male and female referees consistently give higher scores to work done by men than to identical work done by women1,2,3. In addition, women are under-represented in prestigious publications and authorship positions4,5 and women receive ~10% fewer citations6,7. In astronomy, similar biases have been measured in conference participation8,9 and success rates for telescope proposals10,11. Even though the number of doctorate degrees awarded to women is constantly increasing, women still tend to be under-represented in faculty positions12. Spurred by these findings, we measure the role of gender in the number of citations that papers receive in astronomy. To account for the fact that the properties of papers written by men and women differ intrinsically, we use a random forest algorithm to control for the non-gender-specific properties of these papers. Here we show that papers authored by women receive 10.4 ± 0.9% fewer citations than would be expected if the papers with the same non-gender-specific properties were written by men. Gender discrimination is very much an issue in academia generally and in astronomy specifically. Through machine learning techniques, astronomy papers authored by women are shown to have 10% systematically fewer citations than those authored by men.

Quantitative Evaluation of Gender Bias in Astronomical Publications from Citation Counts

We analyze the role of first (leading) author gender on the number of citations that a paper receives, on the publishing frequency and on the self-citing tendency We consider a complete sample of over 200,000 publications from 1950 to 2015 from five major astronomy journals We determine the gender of the first author for over 70% of all publications The fraction of papers which have a female first author has increased from less than 5% in the 1960s to about 25% today We find that the increase of the fraction of papers authored by females is slowest in the most prestigious journals such as Science and Nature Furthermore, female authors write 19$\pm$7% fewer papers in seven years following their first paper than their male colleagues At all times papers with male first authors receive more citations than papers with female first authors This difference has been decreasing with time and amounts to $\sim$6% measured over the last 30 years To account for the fact that the properties of female and male first author papers differ intrinsically, we use a random forest algorithm to control for the non-gender specific properties of these papers which include seniority of the first author, number of references, total number of authors, year of publication, publication journal, field of study and region of the first author's institution We show that papers authored by females receive 104$\pm$09% fewer citations than what would be expected if the papers with the same non-gender specific properties were written by the male authors Finally, we also find that female authors in our sample tend to self-cite more, but that this effect disappears when controlled for non-gender specific variables

Nature Astronomy 1, 0141 (2017); published 26 May 2017; corrected 19 June 2017 In the version of this Letter originally published, the author's name in ref. 11 was incorrect and should have read ‘Reid, I. N.’

/pdf/corrigendum-quantitative-evaluation-of-gender-bias-in-4iw4pxp48f.pdf

Corrigendum: Quantitative evaluation of gender bias in astronomical publications from citation counts

We characterize the optical variability of quasars in the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) and Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) surveys. We re-calibrate the $r$-band light curves for $\sim$28,000 luminous, broad-line AGNs from the SDSS, producing a total of $\sim$2.4 million photometric data points. We utilize both the structure function (SF) and power spectrum density (PSD) formalisms to search for links between the optical variability and the physical parameters of the accreting supermassive black holes that power the quasars. The excess variance (SF$^{2}$) of the quasar sample tends to zero at very short time separations, validating our re-calibration of the time-series data. We find that the the amplitude of variability at a given time-interval, or equivalently the time-scale of variability to reach a certain amplitude, is most strongly correlated with luminosity with weak or no dependence on black hole mass and redshift. For a variability level of SF($\tau$)=0.07 mag, the time-scale has a dependency of $\tau \propto L^{0.4}$. This is broadly consistent with the expectation from a simple Keplerian accretion disk model, which provides $\tau \propto L^{0.5}$. The PSD analysis also reveals that many quasar light curves are steeper than a damped random walk. We find a correlation between the steepness of the PSD slopes, specifically the fraction of slopes steeper than 2.5, and black hole mass, although we cannot exclude the possibility that luminosity or Eddington ratio are the drivers of this effect. This effect is also seen in the SF analysis of the (i)PTF data, and in a PSD analysis of quasars in the SDSS Stripe 82.

Neven Caplar

Papers

Quantitative Evaluation of Gender Bias in Astronomical Publications from Citation Counts

Quantitative Evaluation of Gender Bias in Astronomical Publications from Citation Counts

Corrigendum: Quantitative evaluation of gender bias in astronomical publications from citation counts

Optical variability of AGN in the PTF/iPTF survey

OPTICAL VARIABILITY OF AGNs IN THE PTF/iPTF SURVEY