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Description
Since the advent of Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), a series of complementary surveys has resolved the bulk of the far-infrared extragalactic background into discrete sources. This has revealed a population of heavily dust-obscured sources at high redshift (z>1) undergoing an intense period of massive star-forming activity with inferred star formation rates of several hundred to several thousand solar masses per year. Taken together, these existing surveys cover a total area of 460arcmin^2^ to a range of depths, but combining the results has hitherto been complicated by the fact that different survey groups have used different methods of data reduction and source extraction. In this paper, we re-reduce and re-analyse all of the blank-field surveys to date in an almost identical manner to that employed in the 'SCUBA 8-mJy Survey'. Comparative source catalogues are given which include a number of new significant source detections as well as failing to confirm some of those objects previously published. These new source catalogues have been combined to produce the most accurate number counts to date from 2 to 12.5mJy.
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