Add preferred reference and citation to `sites.json`? about astropy-data

[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...

[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.