  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).
