What would go in a 2.0 paper

Overall goals of the paper, in no specific order:

• Discuss implementation details, tests with other implementations, show robustness, referring to externals tests such as comparison of PINT (which relies on Time) with standard pulsar timing package tempo2 [hamogu: To me seems to be a very important point, because this data-driven approach to software quality is still quite rare in astronomy. It would give a reference for the quality of a package not only for astropy users, but for the comparison packages as well.] We've done this type of comparison with different packages both for time and coordinates and to my knowlegde we might well be the first team to run the comparison over such a large number of packages using all sorts of languages.
• Give update of new capabilities (enhancements of Quantity, modelling, Tables with time and coordinate columns, etc.) [MHvK: seems slightly premature]
• Show how astropy fits in a larger ecosystem (VO work, fits files, ...) [???]

Ideas, in no specific order

(not all of these need to make it into the paper):

• Modeling
• SAMP
• Cone search deprecated in v2.0 as moved out to astroquery
• Upgrades to units/quantity (including using Numpy arrays)
• Table grouping
• New coordinate framework
• Convolution
• Coordinate benchmarks
• Brief discussion of the ambiguities of Galactic coordinates. (As part of a push to standardize?)
• Analytic functions in the process of being moved into modeling
• The astropy-helpers framework and the package template for (affiliated) packages
• Organizational challenges and how we surmounted them (or didn't...)
• Would it be worth referring to any specific research that has used Astropy in a particularly interesting way?
• wcsaxes and other functionality from visualization for plotting
• bolometric mags in units
• major additions to statistics subpackage
• versioning of constants (pending it gets into v2.0)

Who will be the authors?

Options:

• All contributors ever.
• All contributors after 2013 (paper I).

What to we want people to cite?

The first astropy papaer has over 200 citations and counting. In that sense it does a good job of giving academic credit to the early contributors, but not to the new contributors. Do we want one highly cited paper or dilute the citations? Options are:

• Ask people to cite only the most recent paper. [hamogu: My preferred option. Simple. Paper I has enough citations to be important. Gives credit to recent contributors.]
• Ask people to cite all papers. (Fine for now, gets messy in 2025 when we have paper VI).
• Ask people to cite paper I and the most recent.

There are precedents to all three strategies.

Note about what people said on the mailing list (and what's not listed above)

mhvk

I think it might help show to a different set of astronomers that astropy is not just a nice new packages full of nifty stuff, but that it very much helps one stop worrying about whether, e.g., leap seconds are properly included, whether a particular transformation also works near the poles, etc. In this respect, it may also be useful to have some examples of external usage -- e.g., that using Time the new pulsar timing package PINT "can already produce residuals from most "normal" timing models that agree with Tempo and Tempo2 to within ~10 nanoseconds." [1]

All the best,

Marten

[1] https://github.com/nanograv/PINT

T. Robitaille

We could consider asking people to cite all the papers up to the present, so e.g.

Astropy Collaboration (2013, 2015)

to try and avoid the citation dilation issue. Though I think we should think about what is more important - having one paper with 500 citations or five papers with 100 citations - the latter does a lot more for most people's h-index.