Category Archives: data play

Downloading and exploring ASCL information using our API and ADS

Did you know you can download all the ASCL’s entries? You can! If you want all accepted entries: https://ascl.net/code/json

If you want particular fields, use an API query. This query brings up ASCL ID, title, bibcode, and when the entry was last updated.
https://ascl.net/api/search/?q=abstract:%22%22&fl=ascl_id,title,bibcode,time_updated

Want only entries that list a preferred citation? This will do it: https://ascl.net/api/search/?q=citation_method:%22.%22&fl=ascl_id,title,bibcode,citation_method

Find more info on our API here: https://github.com/teuben/ascl-tools/tree/master/API

If you’d like to know more about our metadata schema, please see this page: https://ascl.net/wordpress/about-ascl/metadata-schema/ Screenshot of ADS home page with arrow pointing to ADS search box; the search box contains the search term bibstem:"ascl.soft"

You can also search ADS (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu) for ASCL entries by searching for bibstem:ascl.soft
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/q=bibstem%3Aascl.soft&sort=date%20desc%2C%20bibcode%20desc&p_=0

 

Click the ADS Explore button on screen right and you can play with all kinds of info about ASCL entries, including citation metrics and concept clouds. Is there something else you’d like to see, another way you’d like ASCL entry data? Please let us know!Screenshot of ADS results page with arrow pointing to ADS Explore button

Citations over time

How much have things changed? The previous “big 4” journals that had citations to ASCL entries have been joined by AJ and the percentage of citations from MNRAS has dropped a bit, but overall, the wedges of these two piecharts, one from October, 2015 and the second from today, look remarkably similar.

At the time the 2015 piechart was created, ASCL entries had been cited 465 times; today, ADS shows 2093 citations to ASCL entries. Seventeen percent of ASCL entries had been cited in October 2015, and as of today, over 29% of ASCL entries have citations.

Of course there are other ways to cite software, and the ASCL supports all citable methods and ASCL entries include preferred citation information where possible.

Do we list how your software should be cited? If not, please let us know your preferred method and we will add it to the entry!

ASCL at the AAS231 Hack Together Day

The ASCL was well-represented at the AAS 231 Hack Together Day on Friday, January 12, with Advisory Committee Chairman Peter Teuben working on two hacks, one of which hopes to provide better guidance regarding software to reviewers, dashboard developer PW Ryan also working on two hacks, both related to the ASCL and research we’re conducting, and yours truly; I mostly worked on ASCL tasks that have been backlogged, such as adding preferred citation information to ASCL entries. The ASCL currently has preferred citation information listed for 25% of our entries; we will be adding this information to more records in 2018 where we can find it, though I note that many code sites do not list a preferred citation on their download sites.

For one of his hacks, Ryan grabbed all the Github links in ASCL entries, and then using a Ruby Gem that looks for licenses in Github repos, reported on the licensing information available. These results are preliminary, so please don’t take them as gospel, but it appears that a whopping 34% of these codes do not have licensing information in the repo. The most popular license is MIT, which does not surprise me, as Daniel Foreman-Mackey reported in the Special Session we held at AAS 225 that MIT was the popular license across all Github repos that have licensing info.

Even more data play: Social media and the rest

The pie below shows what percentage of codes in the ASCL have social coding links in their entries, and the Starlink caveat still holds: all the Starlink codes are in one Github repo, so that repo is represented only once in the pie below. These numbers are somewhat low, as some codes offer a webpage/site to which the ASCL links, with that webpage then directing people to a repostitory. If someone does a better analysis, please send it over; I’d love to include it!

socialvseverythingelse

As before, the data are here.

Related posts:
Data play: Social coding sites
More data play: Common domains

Data play: Social coding sites

I’ve posted before about where the codes are; here’s a pie that shows the relative use of Github, Google Code, Bitbucket, and Sourceforge. Please note that because all the Starlink codes are in one Github repo, that repo is represented only once in the pie below. Want to do your own analysis? The site links (1080 of them at the moment, as some codes have more than one) are available here.

socialcodingsitepercentages