Authors Tag Definition: Relates to AJ and ApJ author guidelines.
The editors of many astronomy journals (ApJ, AJ, A&A, MNRAS, PASP, PASJ, and RevMexAA) have adopted these subject keywords as a means of classifying articles in the journals.
Workshop PowerPoint is available here.
Some of these links may require a subscription to the journal.
To create MRTs from an author supplied table a series of Perl and C+ routines are used.
Program extracts any number of columns (and in any order) out of a machine readable table using the information in the metaheader. The program can be used to create a new table from the original machine-readable table that is Tab delimited and thus easily read into spreadsheet programs like EXCEL. The options flags that are Currently available are:
-c#,#,#,...,# : which extracts out the columns numbers given after the -c flag. Each column number needs to be separated by a comma
Given a machine readable table name and optionally
column numbers, this FUNCTION reads the format information in the
meta-header and outputs a IDL function containing either the
complete table or only the requested columns.
data = read_fmr(filename)
filename [STRING]: the name of the file containing the machine readable table. If filename is missing a dialog to select the filename will be presented
Program plots and extracts two columns from a given machine readable table file by using the information in the meta-data header. The output is the information from each column saved in two arrays.
This website provides links to programs written to help journal readers extract and plot the data in machine-readable tables. The ultimate goal is to have programs for different needs and in various languagues.
The continual expansion of capabilities in electronic publishing are now allowing us to expand our abilities to publish machine-readable tables as part of our on-line journals. We now have expanded these capabilities, by producing and posting standard format, machine-readable versions of long tables. Unlike the normal ASCII tables which only contain the raw, tab delimitted data, these machine readable tables are formatted in a standard way so that the information can be easily read into a computer.
In addition to providing further information about a column of data, the label can be used to as a flag to provide limit checks on certain types of common astronomical data.
As more scientific analyses and observations are interlinked via the web it becomes more important to adopt standardized units so that information can be easily compared and used outside of specialized fields.
The AAS Journal's machine-readable tables follow most of the conventions for ASCII tables developed and used by the CDS. The meta-data header provides the key to interpreting the data that follows. Under the section labeled "Byte-by-byte Description of file:" a five column table is used to describe the data. These columns include:
the starting and ending byte locations of the data column separated by a dash.
To aid organizations in obtaining information on the effectiveness of their telescopes, the AAS has created a vocabulary of facility keywords for telescope facilities for use in journal articles. The use of a common set of facility keywords across astronomical publications will make searches for telescopes significantly easier and more accurate. In addition, the facility keywords will be useful for linking papers that use the same telescopes together within the framework of the National Virtual Observatory.
Overview of the AJ and ApJ submission process.
Including author names using Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters
Instructions and samples of citations and reference lists.
These guidelines cover AJ and ApJ (the main journal (Part 1), the Letters (Part 2), and the Supplement Series).
LaTeX is the preferred format. However, Microsoft Word guidelines are available if needed.