High-impact Scientific Software in Astronomy and its creators

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.