AstroGen: A Progress Report

Since early 2014 a small group of volunteers has been compiling the world's astronomy-related doctoral dissertations. Working almost entirely with data available online, we have now listed more than 24,000 such theses, including nearly complete coverage of 21 countries: the United States (14,183), United Kingdom (3699), Spain (1091), Netherlands (982), Canada (872), Australia (738), Sweden (375), Greece (239), Argentina (182), Finland (165), Denmark (110), Ireland (103), South Africa (97), New Zealand (87), Norway (79), Chile (42), Iran (25), Mauritius (5), Iceland (3), Pakistan (2), and Ethiopia (1). These numbers are as of mid-September 2017 and subject to revision. For each country we go back to the beginning of the modern Ph.D. or equivalent. Fully half of the doctorates have been earned since 1999. For each thesis we try to include the author (with links to a website or obituary), awarding institution, year of degree, thesis title, link to the thesis if online (about 64% are), translation of title if necessary, advisor(s), and other mentors.Our goal is to emulate the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP: http://www.genealogy.ams.org/) with a website having a page for each person with links to that person's advisor(s) and students, if any. We will also have a page for each university. We have posted some introductory material on the website (https://astrogen.aas.org/), and are waiting for help from the AAS IT department to convert our data, currently in spreadsheets, to a database and then a website. We expect this to occur in early 2018.I will present some summaries of our results to date and conduct a discussion of how we can expand our database. We have people currently working on France, Russia, and India, but we need volunteers with linguistic ability and, preferably, familiarity with the academic cultures, to take on Germany, Italy, and nearly all the countries of Asia.