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Topic, focus and ideas about the first refereed GammaLib paper

Added by Knödlseder Jürgen over 10 years ago

At the 2nd ctools coding sprint the idea came up to publish together a first GammaLib paper in a refereed journal. This paper could eventually be tied to the GammaLib release 1.0.0, and probably an equivalent ctools release 1.0.0.

This thread is for getting your feedback on the topics that the paper should cover and the focus it should take. So please don’t hesitate to jump in and provide your ideas.


Replies (3)

RE: Topic, focus and ideas about the first refereed GammaLib paper - Added by Deil Christoph over 10 years ago

Some references that could be useful for discussion:

Some possible topics for the paper:

  • Introduction / conclusions: creating an open-source gamma-ray community project, bringing Fermi, HESS, MAGIC, VERITAS developers together for CTA.
  • GammaLib software version 1.0 description (including code examples ... see astropy paper as an example)
  • GammaLib method description (binned and unbinned likelihood evaluation using effective area, PSF, energy dispersion model, maybe background modeling)
  • Available instruments (focus on `lat` and `cta`?)
  • Available ctools in version 1.0 (what they do, what their main inputs / outputs are)
  • Applications (see ICRC 2013 proceeding as an example)
  • Validation using HESS, MAGIC, VERITAS data or CTA simulations

My opinion:

I think the main focus should be on the description of the GammaLib / ctools 1.0 software and methods.
For the first time there is now a software that can do advanced cube-style likelihood modelling / fitting (proper spectral analysis of overlapping sources), combining Fermi LAT, HESS and ... data.

Of course there need to be some applications and validation, but I think I would keep this part shorter than the software / method part, maybe with similar analyses as in the ICRC 2013 proceeding.
This would leave room for future papers using GammaLib / ctools for extensive studies.
Although if others think applications / validation against Fermi and HESS tools should be a big part of this paper, that would be fine with me, too.

RE: Topic, focus and ideas about the first refereed GammaLib paper - Added by Schulz Anneli over 10 years ago

Hi,
I think it is a good idea. And I agree that the focus should be on the description of GammaLib /ctools software and methods. Concerning validation:
  • I spent some time doing validation with Fermi Science Tools (see e.g. https://cta-redmine.irap.omp.eu/projects/gammalib/wiki/Validation_of_Pass_7REP), unfortunately new issues are coming up with the cross-checks of the Fermi Science Tools and ctools, but I hope I can resolve them together with Jürgen rather soon. So this might be a good validation to put in the paper. One complication ist that the paper would have to be a Fermi Cat.2 paper since I am a Fermi member. Fermi Cat.2 means that you get an internal referee from the fermi collaboration and have to go through the submission process there, but it’s not a big thing.
  • the validation using HESS, MAGIC or VERITAS data: I think it will be very hard to use data proprietary to the collaborations. If we wanted to use for example the crab as validation source, there would be a long discussion on the reference spectrum from the hess software and then followed by a discussion about the differences of the analysis results from software available inside the hess collaboration. So I think this would lead to a much longer timescale for the paper.

So my suggestion would be to do the validation with Fermi data and CTA simulations.

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