Category Archives: codes

This is an update on figures I’ve previously shared (most recently here). Currently, the ASCL indexes 977 codes. The percentage of these codes housed on social coding sites are:

GitHub: 8.1%
SourceForge: 4.2%
Code.Google: 2.8%
Bitbucket: 1.3%

This gives us 16.4% of codes listed on the ASCL housed on a public social coding site, an increase since February of 5.4%, most of this from GitHub (up from 4.2% in February), though the percentages of four sites have increased.

As I said in February, I expect the percentage of codes on social coding sites will continue to grow, especially since GitHub’s use is increasing quickly in the community. One factor some credit for this increase is that GitHub has made it easy to push code to Zenodo for archiving and DOI minting, and providing another way to cite code.*

As mentioned in my previous post, how codes are cited vary. Software citation will be the main topic at Tuesday’s inaugural Software Publishing Special Interest Group meeting at AAS225, which will be held at 3:45 PM in 615 of the Convention Center. If you are at AAS this week, you are welcome to attend and I hope to see you there!

*It was reported at .Astronomy6 that “some astro journals won’t even accept a DOI as a citation.” I don’t know which journals and hope someone will enlighten me; I would like to know the rationale for that stance and would gladly take this up with publishers.

Astro software citation examples

One of the unconference sessions (proposed during the event) held at December’s .Astronomy was on software citation, this subject having come up in an earlier session on improving credit for software.

Discussion and comments in the session inspired me to look at astronomy’s current practices for citing software. Though not an exhaustive list, I looked in more than a dozen journals for citations for codes used in research, and below are some of the examples I gathered.

The most common way to cite software is to reference a paper describing the code. This is how, for example, the authors of yt would like that software cited, as shown from a recent MNRAS paper:

Sometimes a link to the website for a code is listed as a reference to it, as was done in a Classical and Quantum Gravity paper:

Conference proceedings are cited in some cases, as the citation below for WCSTools in an The Astrophysical Journal paper demonstrates:

Other: citation from ApJ for conference proceedings for WCStools

ASCL entries can be cited, too, as shown in this citation for pynbody in a paper published in Physical Review D:

Someone — I don’t remember who — reported that Google Scholar does not index mentions of codes, GitHub repos, etc. as citations, because they are not papers. An opinion tweeted out about this summed up the sentiment in the room pretty well! I plan to take this up with Google after the AAS meeting. Fortunately, ADS does index properly formatted software references; the only reference listed in this post that I didn’t see captured by ADS was the URL for CAMB, which is not surprising (nor expected).

A subsequent post will include additional information and a list of resources about software citation, to be posted before the first Special Interest Group on software publishing meeting scheduled at AAS225 that will be held on Tuesday, January 6, from 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM in 615 in the Convention Center. The main topic of this meeting will be software citation, and all interested parties are welcome to attend.

The journals below were part of my hunting grounds for software citations. Ever had a citation to software you used in research refused by a publication? If so, I’m interested in knowing the details; please share here or send them to editor@ascl.net. Thanks!

American Institute of Physics Proceedings
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Astronomy and Computing
The Astronomical Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement
Classical and Quantum Gravity
Icarus
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Nature
Physical Review D
Proceedings of the SPIE
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Additional screenshots of software citations:

Formatting counts! Below, two citations for Turbospectrum, the first formatted in a way ADS can pick up and count the citation, the second one not.

ASCL at .Astronomy!

The ASCL is at .Astronomy (“dot astronomy”), which officially starts tomorrow morning. Three days of unconference, discussion, sessions, hacking, ideas, collaborating, fun, cool buttons, and, rumor has it, Belgian chocolate, in the magnificent city of Chicago. Follow along on Twitter, hashtag #dotastro!