Scientific Impact of novel Instrumentation: the Case of MUSE

In the process of transforming science cases into a viable and affordable design for a novel instrument, there is the problem of how to gauge their scientific impact, especially when they end up in competing top level requirements that can be incompatible with each other. This research note presents a case study for scientific impact of the integral field spectrograph MUSE in terms of number of refereed publications from 2014 to 2024 as a figure of merit, broken down by different research areas. The analysis is based on the Basic ESO Publication Statistics service (BEPS) and NASA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS).