100. A Century of UKSP Nuggets

Authors: Iain Hannah and Lyndsay Fletcher
University of Glasgow.

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Introduction

Welcome to the 100th UKSP nugget*. To mark this milestone we thought it was time to have a look back at some of the solar physics research we have been highlighting through the nuggets since the first one back in July 2010. Thanks to all the authors for their work and a visual summary of all their nuggets is shown in Figure 1.

What have the nuggets been about?

Figure 1. Visually what 99 UKSP nuggets look like – in order the icons of the nuggets so far.

What topics do the UKSP Nuggets cover? A word cloud of all the nugget titles is shown in Figure 2. It appears that “coronal” and “corona” are our favourite part of the Sun, “magnetic”, “reconnection” and “waves” are also well covered, but not so many people are working on “sunspots” or “chromosphere” or “particles”, it seems! If you think that your favourite solar word is too small here, why not write a nugget?

Figure 2. Word cloud of the titles of the first 99 UKSP nuggets – bigger means more appearances in titles.
Figure 3. Who is writing the UKSP nuggets – the size/colour shows institutes with 1 to 11 nuggets.

UKSP nuggets are written by authors throughout the UK, as can be seen in Figure 3. Most of the main centres for solar physics in the UK are covered – can you name them? If you have a piece of solar physics work that is led from the UK and want to write a nugget for us, please get in touch. General advice is still under 1,000 words is best if you want the most readers, however from the previous nugget summary the relationship between page views and length is no longer as clear, see Figure 4.

Figure 4. Page views versus the number of words in the nugget.

Who is reading the nuggets?

Each nugget still typically gets about 100 views just after publication and that slowly grows over time, with a long term average of unique views per nugget at nearly 400. Some of the most popular nuggets have several thousand views. In total we have had nearly 40,000 page views, and 34,000 unique pages views of the nuggets. The readers of the nuggets are predominantly from the UK (43%), but we have page views from around the world, see Figure 5. The rest of the top ten countries for views are United States (15%), China (5%), India (5%), Russia (4%), Mexico (3%), Poland (2%), Germany (2%), Ireland (2%).

Figure 5. Where in the world the UKSP nuggets are being viewed. Thanks to Google Analytics.

What next?

UKSP nugget 101 of course. Solar physics continues to be a highly productive field in the UK, which will no doubt continue given our leading involvement in new telescopes and missions like Solar Orbiter, DKIST (and EST), SKA etc, as well as the latest numerical and analytical work. We are very grateful to everyone who has contributed to the UKSP nuggets, and are always looking for new UK-based nuggeteers (particularly early-career researchers) to help tell the world about our solar physics research. We would also like to hear your comments and suggestions about the UKSP nuggets.

*Technically this is UKSP Nugget #101, as a previous summary at the 3 year mark was a special unnumbered nugget.