Add preferred reference and citation to sites.json?

[hamogu]

Description

It occurs to me that there is some overlap between sites.json and https://github.com/astrofrog/acknowledgment-generator. They have different use cases, but they are both about keeping a database of observatory data. In sites.json we collect the source of the LAT/LON information, which often (but not always) is the same scholary paper that would be used to acknowledge data from that observatory. Thus, it might be good for the community to combine the two data bases in one.

Additional context

Since it would be considerable work to backfill all values for all observatories that are not common to both databases right now, I suggest to allow a string value of "not filled in the database yet, but please support this work by open a PR here: LINK". There is some overlap already, in particular for the major observatories.

sites.json also does not include space-based facilities. Either we change the structure to allow a value for location that is "space", or we keep this restricted to ground-based facilities and leave is up to users such as https://github.com/astrofrog/acknowledgment-generator to handle space facilities separately.

[pllim]

I wasn't even aware https://github.com/astrofrog/acknowledgment-generator existed. Is it used for anything in production?

[hamogu]

Yes: https://astrofrog.github.io/acknowledgment-generator/

It's not super-busy, but occasionally we get people submitting PRs for new acknowledgements for some observatory they just needed to cite, so I know it's used. @astrofrog is very busy these days, so I help him maintain it. It's not formally part of astropy, but there is significant overlap between maintainer and users, that I think it might make sense to merge functionality to reduce total maintenance and increase visibility. If implemented today, I would probably suggest to make it part of the astropy core package, but when implemented, a web front-end was the priority. Still, there is no reason, it can't share at least a database with astropy.

[hamogu]

We often complain that surveys, telescopes, and software don't get the citations or acknowledgements they deserve, but the truth is that it's an absolute pain to find the correct way to acknowledge or cite some one those things. Let's say I download Chandra data, compare is with 2MASS and SDSS, and I'm already at ~10 citations/acknowledgements (Chandra istself, the instrument used, the CIAO software, the sherpa software, the archive, 2 MASS, maybe VIZIER is that's where I got the data, astroquery if I used that, astropy, SDSS, probably ADS). Each of them has different guidelines on how to be acknowledged, and that's typically not on the front page but requires dedicated study of the documentation for each dataset, instrument, or service.

The acknowledgement generator was made to crowd-source the input and then have a simple interface to generate the acknowledgements to just past in your paper. I use it when I write papers using data/software/services that I don't use very frequently, i.e. where I don't know on top of my head how to cite.

[pllim]

👍 to folding it into Astropy Project if it is still useful and we have maintainers. Maybe we should add this topic to the Coordination Meeting suggestions...