Links: NASA/ADS Custom Query Form | NASA/ADS Table of Contents | arXiv astro-ph search | Daily astro-ph listing

Your literature folder

M+Box folders have been set up for you to store your personal repository of journal papers. When it comes to presenting your work, it will be very useful to have in one place the papers you have read. If I have set the permissions correctly, you should be able to view all the folders but only edit your own.

  • Link to ASTR group literature M+Box folder (UM-D internal: should open in a new tab or window)

  • Journals

    In research Astronomy the pace of discovery is too rapid for books to be the main delivery of research information. Instead, refereed journal papers are the main method by which ideas are released into the wild (having been reviewed by another astronomer first, ideally an expert in the subject of the paper). These are the "papers" we often refer to. Keeping up with the literature is essential for success in research.

    However the sheer rate and volume of new literature can be overwhelming; the arXiv preprint server, for example, receives on the order of 50 new papers every day in Astronomy - although the vast majority of these papers are not relevant to every individual. To help you keep track, we will do two things:

    1. Literature M+Box folder: Each researcher in the ASTR group will be given an M+Box folder for their project. You should curate your journals folder with pdfs of papers you read for the project - when it comes to writing up your work for presentation or publication, this folder will be your repository for literature you will need to cite. To help share knowledge, your literature folder will be viewable by the rest of the ASTR group.

  • 2. Journal club: Meetings in which a substantial portion of the group discusses one or more papers in the recent literature. More information about this is given below. The most important journals in Astronomy are:
  • The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) and ApJ Letters
  • The Astronomical Journal (AJ) and AJ Letters
  • Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) and A&A research notes
  • Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) and Letters to MNRAS
  • Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP)

  • These are the top handful of about 15-20 journals devoted mostly or exclusively to astronomy and astrophysics; others include Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics (ARA&A) and New Astronomy Reviews (NewA). In addition, Nature magazine and Science magazine publish refereed journal results generally held to have particularly high interest to the entire scientific community. If you have a first-author publication in either of these, you are doing very well!

    Fortunately, you do not have to visit each journal individually or memorize volumes and page numbers to keep track of the literature - (although you certainly can navigate to the homepages of these journals to leaf through the contents, which can also be rewarding.) It's more useful just to look up the article you want in a unified way. There are also some Social Media services that can help you keep up-to-date.

    Finding papers

    Refereed journals: NASA's Astrophysics Data System is the most useful portal for looking up journals. There are two modes you may find useful, I encourage you to click around and become familiar with this service:
  • The NASA/ADS Custom Query Form is for looking up a journal article when you already have some information about the reference you want (e.g. you've found the article in another paper and want to look it up).
  • The NASA/ADS Table of Contents page takes you to the most recent contents list (including links to the journals themselves) of 29 selected journals (including all the ones listed above).

  • The "results" page in each case contains links to the full journal (if present electronically - most are); clicking on the result brings up the paper. In addition to the paper itself, you'll see links labeled by a single letter: for example, the link labeled "C" means "Citations," and is a useful way to find what other papers cited the one you are presently reading.

    The preprint server: To get the most recent publications (or to get publications that you don't have access to through UM-Dearborn's library), look at the arXiv preprint server. Note that both refereed andnon-refereed publications appear here. Some authors like to post articles they have recently submitted for publication to one of the journals in order to get feedback from the community before publication; sometimes individual arguments can play back and forth on the preprint server. You have been warned! Useful links:

  • arXiv astro-ph search: useful to find specific papers (although the interface is not as sophisticated as NASA/ADS' portal).
  • Daily astro-ph listing: shows all the papers submitted to the preprint server in the most recent mailing. Updated daily every weekday.
  • Social media and podcasts

    A growing number of resources use social media to alert you to breaking developments in the literature. Some of my favorites that don't fill up your feed with extraneous information:

  • The @arXiver Twitter feed; at-a-glance summaries of the daily astro-ph posting, including an image of the key figure in the paper (as judged by the moderators);
  • The @astrobites Twitter feed; this is the Twitter feed to the Astrobites website;
  • The @adsabs Twitter feed; this is the Twitter feed of the NASA/ADS introduced above, and is a sort of "paper of the day" feed.
  • Facebook: Astronomers are quite active on Facebook; a surprising fraction of the time I'll first learn about some new development when one of my astronomer friends posts about it.
  • The Linear Digressions podcast: This set of roughly 15-minute podcasts is a breezy but up-to-date set of introductions to all sorts of topics in modern data analysis. Co-hosted by a web developer and an experimental physicist, this is a fun and rewarding listen.
  • Reading papers

    Here are some useful things to bear in mind as you read a journal article:
  • What is the research question the paper seeks to answer?
  • What is the context of the research in the paper? How is the work in the paper relevant or helpful?
  • Has the research question been addressed in the paper to your satisfaction?
  • (Related:) how hard have the authors tried to address ways in which the same data might not indicate the effect they claim after all?
  • Don't get bogged down in the details - if you don't understand something it's possible the authors did not explain themselves sufficiently clearly.
  • Unlike textbooks in Physics, you are not expected to be able to derive the equations given the explanation in the text - indeed, many of the equations may not be relevant to your work. However, you should be able to understand the general behaviors in formulae that are relevant to the work you are doing.
  • Journal Club

    A typical mainstay of research departments is the "Journal Club," in which group members meet regularly to critically discuss (usually recent) articles in the literature. All the attendees read the chosen journal article and come to the meeting prepared to discuss it, and the discussion is then led by a group member.

    Most weeks there will be two papers discussed. At this stage I intend this to be one science paper, one paper more aimed at technical issues (usually one person would take one paper). The technial "paper" may well be rather longer than the science paper, as it may cover material underlying many of the methods you will be using.

    I am open to suggestions from you for papers you wish to discuss! Click here for suggestions thus far, or to add your own suggestion.

    (Update 2019 April: Journal club meetings were suspended in AY 2018-2019 due to issues with time availability, but will be resumed if there is sufficient interest and availability among group members. Previous topics and presenters are still available below.)

    Date in 2017 Location Discusser Paper
    Tues Mar 21st at 12:00 Noon ASC 119 Kawther Science paper: Mirabel 2016 NewAst Rev Submitted: Formation of black holes in the dark
    Fri Mar 10th at 11:00 am ASC 119 Noah Science paper:Monteux et al. 2014 Icarus 237, 377: Can large icy moons accrete undifferentiated?
    Fri Feb 10th ASC 119 Eric Science paper: O'Brien et al. 2002 MNRAS 334, 426: Echoes in X-ray Binaries
    Date in 2016 Location Discusser Paper
    Mon Nov 7th at 12:00 Noon ASC 119 Aunna Science paper: Montet et al. 2016 ApJ Lett 830,39: KIC 8462852 faded throughout the Kepler Mission
    Mon Nov 7th at 12:00 Noon ASC 119 Will or volunteer Technical paper: Dolphin 2000 PASP 112, 1383: WFPC2 Stellar Photometry with HSTphot
    Mon Oct 23rd as 12:00 Noon ASC 119 Volunteer welcome! Science paper: Minniti et al. 2016 ApJ Lett 830,1: Discovery of RR Lyrae Stars in the Nuclear Bulge of the Milky Way
    Weds Mar 16 Future date TBD ASC 119 TBC Technical/position papers (I recommend at least skim-reading these):
    1. Chillingarian & Zolotukhin (2011 ADASS XX); The true bottleneck of modern scientific computing in Astronomy; arXiv link: arXiv:1012.4119
    2. Zhang & Zhao (2015 Data Science Journal 14, 11): Astronomy in the Big Data Era; direct link at Data Science Journal
    3. Feigelson & Babu (2012, Significance); Big Data in Astronomy; direct link at PSU Astrostatistics

    The following 5-minute video is also of interest in this context: David Hogg (NYU) interview: what "Big Data" means (KICP website).
    Weds Mar 30 at 11:00am ASC 119 Will (probably - other volunteers welcome!) Science paper: Bland-Hawthorn & Gerhard (2016 ARA&A 54) The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic and Integrated Properties
    Bland-Hawthorn & Gerhard 2016 (arXiv link).
    Weds Mar 23 at 11:00am ASC 119 Mark, Will, Aunna Report from and discussion of the Compact Objects In Michigan IV meeting, (which was held Mon Mar 21 at Wayne State)
    Weds Mar 09 at 11:00am ASC 119 Mark The Swift X-ray satellite
    Weds Mar 09 at 11:00am ASC 119 Lucas? (TBC) Technical paper: Foreman-Mackey et al. (2013): emcee: the MCMC Hammer; 2013 PASP 125, 306 Published version (M+Box); or arXiv:1202.3665.
    Weds Feb 24 at 11:00am ASC 119 Aunna and Brittany Science paper: Abbott et al. 2016 ApJ Lett accepted: Astrophysical implications of the binary black-hole merger GW150914: available at arXiv:1602.03846

    Weds Feb 24 at 11:00am ASC 119 Will Technical paper: VanderPlas (2014); Frequentism and Bayesianism: a Python-driven Primer; 2014 Proc. SCIPY 2014 (refereed) published version; identical to the version at arXiv.1411.5018v1.

    NOTE: If you want to try this out yourself, see Jake VdP's Blog post about this, e.g. Frequentism and Bayesianism: a Practical Introduction
    Weds Feb 17 at 11:00am ASC 119 Aunna and Brittany Science and technical papers: (I suggest reading the first (PRL) in detail);
    Abbott et al. 2016 Phys Rev Lett 116, 061102: Detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger Published paper (M+Box); also available at arXiv:1602.03837

    Abbott et al. 2016 ApJ Lett accepted: Astrophysical implications of the binary black-hole merger GW150914: available at arXiv:1602.03846

    Weds Feb 10 at 11:00am ASC 119 Brittany and Emily Science paper: Deacon et al. (2009); The IPHAS-POSS-I proper motion survey of the Galactic plane; 2009 MNRAS 397, 1685 Published paper (M+Box); or arXiv:0905.2594
    Weds Feb 10 at 11:00am ASC 119 Lucas? Will Technical paper: Hogg et al. (2010): Data analysis recipes: Fitting a Model to data (lecture notes published on the arXiv). arXiv:1008.4686

    NOTE Tues Feb 09: there isn't much time to read this before the meeting, I will advertise its main features during the discussion on the 10th if time permits.
    Weds Feb 03 at 11:00am ASC 119 Lucas Science paper: Batygin & Brown (2016); Evidence for a distant giant planet in the Solar System; 2016 AJ 151, 22. Published paper (M+Box); or arXiv:1601.05438
    Weds Feb 03 at 11:00am ASC 119 Aunna Technical paper: Hippke & Angerhausen (2016 Jan 28th): KIC 8462852 did likely not fade during the last 100 years. PDF preprint; equivalently arXiv:1601.07314.

    Note: Hippke & Angerhausen (2016) refer frequently to Schaefer (2016 ApJ Lett Submitted), which can be found at M+Box or at arXiv:1601.03256 (Jan 13 2016).
    Weds Jan 27 at 11:00am ASC 119 Will Science paper: Zoccali & Valenti (2016 PASA in press); The 3D Structure of the Galactic Bulge; arxiv link: arXiv:1601.02839
    Weds Jan 27 at 11:00am ASC 119 Will Technical/position papers (I recommend at least skim-reading these):
    1. Chillingarian & Zolotukhin (2011 ADASS XX); The true bottleneck of modern scientific computing in Astronomy
    2. Zhang & Zhao (2015 Data Science Journal 14, 11): Astronomy in the Big Data Era
    3. Feigelson & Babu (2012, Significance); Big Data in Astronomy
    Deferred to a later meeting.


    Date in 2015 Location Discusser Paper
    Fri Apr 3rd at 3:00pm CIS 121 Lizzy Clyne Science paper: Mainzer et al. 2014: The population of tine Near-Earth Objects observed by NEOWISE(arXiv link)
    Fri Mar 20th CIS 121 Chris Elpers Science \& Technical paper: Hong et al. 2009 ApJ: Chandra discovery of an Intermediate Polar in Baade's Window (arXiv link)
    Fri Mar 13th CIS 121 Nathan Fuller Science \& Technical paper: Courtecuisse \& Allard 2009 Parallel Dense Gauss-Seidel Algorithm on Many-Core Processors
    Fri Feb 13th CIS 121 Aunna Elrod Science paper: Stolte et al. 2014 ApJ (published version): The Orbital Motion of the Quintuplet Cluster—A Common Origin for the Arches and Quintuplet Clusters? (arXiv link)
    Fri Feb 13th CIS 121 Will Clarkson Technical paper: Same as Fri Feb 06th below.
    Fri Feb 06th CIS 121 Will Clarkson Science paper: Wu et al. 2015 MNRAS Accepted: Gemini Spectroscopy of Galactic Bulge Sources: A Population of Hidden Accreting Binaries Revealed? (arXiv link)
    Fri Feb 06th CIS 121 Will Clarkson Technical paper: Numerical Recipes chapter 15: Modeling Data
    (Note: this pdf file covers the same ground as the physical copy in SBCW 2216 (the red hardback copy of Numerical Recipes).


    A running tally of journal club papers will be kept at this M+Box folder.

    Glossary of technical terms

    WIC Thurs Feb 5th 2015: I am using the google doc at the link below to keep track of technical terms, many of which might be unfamiliar to several of you at the same time. This is an openly-editable document - when you come across a term you don't know, add it to this document! If there is a term someone else has added that you know, feel free to fill in the definition.

    Click here for the editable glossary of terms.

    This document should be editable in your browser to anyone signed into the UM system.