Author Archives: Alice Allen

Change to the Code Record page

From feedback we received about the “Ref” field, we’ve relabeled that field to lessen the confusion about the article link(s) in the Code Record. What had appeared is:

What now appears is:

We supply a link, too, to a page that explains what the Website, Appears in, and Bibcode fields are, and hope this makes things clearer.

If you have suggestions for the ASCL, please feel free to post them here or email editor@ascl.net. Thank you!

July 2015 additions to the ASCL

Twenty codes were added to the ASCL in July 2015:

3D-Barolo: 3D fitting tool for the kinematics of galaxies
abo-cross: Hydrogen broadening cross-section calculator
Astrochem: Abundances of chemical species in the interstellar medium
AstroStat: Statistical analysis tool
DALI: Derivative Approximation for LIkelihoods

DRAMA: Instrumentation software environment
FAT: Fully Automated TiRiFiC
getsources: Multi-scale, multi-wavelength source extraction
HLINOP: Hydrogen LINe OPacity in stellar atmospheres
IEHI: Ionization Equilibrium for Heavy Ions

K-Inpainting: Inpainting for Kepler
L-PICOLA: Fast dark matter simulation code
Least Asymmetry: Centering Method
Pelican: Pipeline for Extensible, Lightweight Imaging and CAlibratioN
PPInteractions: Secondary particle spectra from proton-proton interactions

pyro: Python-based tutorial for computational methods for hydrodynamics
REDSPEC: NIRSPEC data reduction
slimplectic: Discrete non-conservative numerical integrator
SUPERBOX: Particle-multi-mesh code to simulate galaxies
Toyz: Large datasets and astronomical images analysis framework

The “Ref” field in an ASCL entry

ASCL entries include a field called “Ref,” for “refereed.” As the ASCL indexes codes used in research, this field contains at least one link to a research article which describes a code or in which the code was used.

Screen capture showing Site and Ref fields in an ASCL entry

The information in the Ref field is used by ADS to link papers and the codes they use, making it easy for someone reading an article to find the code(s) used in that research. You can find these associations in the “Associated Articles” section of an ADS entry.

In the first image below, which is a screen clip from an ADS entry, the Source Software link brings up the ASCL entry for a code used in the article; in the second image, the Paper 1 link brings up a paper that used the code:

Some papers have several links in the Ref field:

These are papers we found while researching a code or were entered by a code author when submitting code to the ASCL. Associating article entries with entries for the codes used in those articles makes finding the software used in the research easier. And though software is increasingly cited (in a variety of ways), it isn’t always, so using the Ref/Associated Articles links can help a code author demonstrate the impact of a particular software package.

I know the ASCL is missing many of these associations; ADS and the ASCL would like to improve this linkage. If you have ideas on how to do this, please post them here, or send them to editor@ascl.net. Thanks!

June 2015 additions to the ASCL

Ten codes were added to the ASCL in June 2015:

dmdd: Dark matter direct detection
EATCVB: Coronal heating rate approximations
fsclean: Faraday Synthesis CLEAN imager
multiband_LS: Multiband Lomb-Scargle Periodograms
PLATO Simulator: Realistic simulations of expected observations

pyKLIP: PSF Subtraction for Exoplanets and Disks
PyMC: Bayesian Stochastic Modelling in Python
REALMAF: Magnetic power spectra from Faraday rotation maps
SPRITE: Sparsity-based super-resolution algorithm
VAPID: Voigt Absorption-Profile [Interstellar] Dabbler

The 3rd DC/MD/VA Summer Astrophysics Meeting

On Thursday, June 25, I attended part of the 3rd annual DC/MD/VA Summer Astrophysics Meeting; duties elsewhere prevented me from attending the whole event, alas. This meeting, which rotates among the sponsoring universities, was held this year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and is intended for senior undergraduates and graduate students to network, present their work, and facilitate interaction among local institutions. At least ten area universities were represented at the event.

I arrived in plenty of time to hear keynote speaker Dr. Jennifer Wiseman‘s excellent presentation The Hubble Space Telescope: 25 Years of Science and Discovery; it is always a pleasure to hear her speak.

Next on the agenda were Jeremy Hare from George Washington University, who presented Unveiling the nature of high energy sources using machine learning and Joel Coley from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with Probing the long-term variability and eclipsing properties of high-mass X-ray binaries. After a short break, the program continued with a presentation on The science of WFIRST: Gravitational microlensing, the galactic bulge, and the transit method, this originally to be presented by Kathryn Waychoff of Dartmouth College and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, but given in her absence instead by three of GSFC undergraduate summer interns ~~whose names I unfortunately did not catch~~* Nyki Anderson, Emily Kilen, and Sean Terry; they did an amazing job. (I kept thinking, “These are summer interns?!?!” They really knew their stuff!)

My presentation on the ASCL was the last of the day. Only a few people present had heard of the ASCL before this meeting; I was happy for the opportunity to bring the ASCL to this audience. My talk covered what the ASCL is, why it exists, and how it has grown and is used by the community; my PowerPoint presentation (with speaker notes) is available for download.

In addition to Thursday afternoon’s presentations, I got a chance to peruse posters and talk with some of the poster presenters. I’m so pleased I could participate, and wish only that I had been able to attend all of it! The future of astrophysics is in good hands. Kudos to the organizers and participants for such an excellent event.

*My thanks to Sean for filling in the blanks for me!

And so it grows…

… maybe not like topsy, but steadily nonetheless. In looking at the ASCL’s growth over the past year, I see that on June 15 of last year, ADS held 818 ASCL entries with 168 cumulative citations. 78 different codes had been cited by their ASCL ID, or 9.5% of codes in the ASCL.

Today, there are 1079 ASCL records in ADS with a total of 334 citations, nearly double last year, and the number of codes cited by ASCL ID has just more than doubled; that number now stands at 158, which is 14.6% of codes in the ASCL cited using the ASCL record.

So if my figuring is correct (no guarantees…), the ASCL has grown 32% in the past year (by 261 codes, from 818 to 1079), while codes in the ASCL cited by these entries is up 100%.

We are very interested in code citation, however that happens; we want software authors to gain exposure and credit for their work! A number of excellent ways to cite codes exist, and so long as codes do get cited, we don’t care how. We track citations to ASCL entries because this is one way to determine whether the ASCL is being used; page views are another measure we employ.

And yes, it’s being used. Yay! Thank you!