The Astronomy Genealogy Project

The Astronomy Genealogy Project (AstroGen) has been underway since 2013. We are creating a database of all astronomy-related doctoral dissertations. Each entry contains the name(s) of the author, awarding institution, year, title, advisor(s), other important mentors, and links to the thesis if it is online and to a page about the author's professional life (obituary if deceased). Included in the database are names, locations, and other information about universities. An important goal of this project is to enable tracing the academic lineage of all who have ever held a doctorate in an astronomy-related field, through the relation between advisor (academic parent) and doctoral student (academic child). The project is sponsored by the AAS Historical Astronomy Division (HAD). It was conceived and is led by Joseph S. Tenn. AstroGen is modeled after the Mathematics Genealogy Project (http://www.genealogy.ams.org/), directed by Mitchell Keller. The AstroGen team has had to make a series of decisions regarding the scope and contents of the database, such as what constitutes an eligible dissertation, how to handle the different degrees awarded in different countries, criteria for accepting co-advisors and mentors, dealing with universities that change their names, merge or split, and distinguishing between individuals with the same name. All information is provided in the native language and in English. Most information is obtained from online sources, though some libraries have been visited as well. As of September 2018 we have recorded about 27,000 theses, with Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Iran, Ireland, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States fairly complete, and we have started work on France, India, and Russia. We need volunteers familiar with the languages and, if possible, the academic cultures of other nations. The emphasis is still on data collection, but the AAS, which is currently undergoing major changes in how it handles IT, has promised to assist in getting the project onto the AAS website in the not-too-distant future.