High-impact Scientific Software in Astronomy and its creators

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes 3432 astronomy-related scientific software packages to quantify their development activity, impact, and key contributors, revealing the prominence of US institutes and individual-led projects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of astronomy software, identifying major themes, impact metrics, and the distribution of contributors and institutions involved.

Findings

Over 200 active developers daily in astronomy software

Half of development by US-affiliated institutes

Many high-impact projects led by single individuals

Abstract

In the last decades, scientific software has graduated from a hidden side-product to a first-class member of the astrophysics literature. We aim to quantify the activity and impact of software development for astronomy, using a systematic survey. Starting from the Astrophysics Source Code Library and the Journal of Open Source Software, we analyse 3432 public git-based scientific software packages. Paper abstract text analysis suggests seven dominant themes: cosmology, data reduction pipelines, exoplanets, hydrodynamic simulations, radiative transfer spectra simulation, statistical inference and galaxies. We present key individual software contributors, their affiliated institutes and countries of high-impact software in astronomy & astrophysics. We consider the number of citations to papers using the software and the number of person-days from their git repositories, as proxies for impact and complexity, respectively. We find that half of the mapped development is through US-affiliated institutes, and a large number of high-impact projects are led by a single person. Our results indicate that there are currently over 200 people active on any given day to improve software in astronomy.