Guidelines for Chandra Science Publications



Acknowledgment of the Use of Chandra

Funding

All publications of material based on or developed under a Chandra Award must carry an acknowledgment of the Chandra Program as below, incorporating the relevant Chandra Award Number. Such numbers usually begin with GO, AR, TM or DD.

"Support for this work was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through Chandra Award Number ______ issued by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Administration under contract NAS8-03060."

All releases of photographic or illustrative data products should include the following acknowledgment on the credit line:

"Photograph [or illustration, figure, etc.] courtesy of the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory on behalf of NASA, and [the Principal Investigator's Institution]."

Text reproduced from the Chandra Grants Terms and Conditions, Section XV.



Data

Authors of publications which use Chandra data (whether new or archived) are asked to include an acknowledgement similar to the following:

The scientific results reported in this article are based [if applicable: in part or to a significant degree] on observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory [for articles by the PI team], data obtained from the Chandra Data Archive [for articles based on archival data], observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and published previously in cited articles [for articles based on published results].

Please also include a list of the ObsIDs and/or Dataset Identifiers for the data reported in your manuscript to ensure that archive users can easily find and cite your results (see Linking Data section below).


Software

Please acknowledge in the acknowledgment section of any resulting publications use of CXC software. This will help greatly to keep track of software usage, etc.

As an example, the following language is suggested (to be adapted as applicable, of course):
"This research has made use of software provided by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) in the application packages CIAO, ChIPS, and Sherpa."




Linking Data and Publications

The Chandra archive is at the forefront of efforts to ensure that archived data and any publications that report on that data are directly linked. This information is crucial for data mining tools and research aids that exploit the combined information of observations and their publication. To ensure that your publications are clearly available for archive users, please be sure to list the actual ObsIds or Dataset Identifiers in your manuscript.

Benefits of including this information:

To find and/or report unlisted CRPs:

New Publications that include Chandra data should include:




Chandra-Related PhD Theses

We are collecting information about student involvement with Chandra science so that we have a quantitative estimate of this part of the program. If you have been PI on a Chandra program that was analyzed as part of a PhD thesis, or if your own thesis involved Chandra-related research, please check to make sure that it has been recognized and counted.

If you or someone you know of has completed a PhD thesis with a substantial Chandra component that is *not* already listed in ADS or at http://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/cda/bibstats/biblists/phd_papers.html please let us know at cxchelp@head.cfa.harvard.edu, providing as much information as you have: author name, title, institution, year, advisor name, and abstract and/or a link to the thesis.

Chandra-related Theses should also be retrievable from the ADS search page http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html as follows:

  1. In the 'Filters' section of the page, in the box called "Select/deselect publications:", type in "PhDT".
  2. Farther down in the Filters section, under "Select References In:", select "All of the following (AND):" and then check the Chandra box.
  3. Press the "Send Query" button, and look for the thesis of interest in the results.




Chandra-Discovered Source Naming Convention

The IAU Clearing House has approved the use of three acronyms for use in designation of sources found with the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Please Note:

The coordinate information in source names is obtained by truncating the coordinate values. That means, for instance, that, in a catalog using acronym CXOXYZ and the same number of digits as CXOU, the source with coordinates:
RA = 12h 34m 56.789s, Dec = 12d 34' 56.789"
will have the name:
CXOXYZ J123456.7+123456
This is a universal rule that applies to all source acronyms registered with the IAU Clearing House.

We strongly suggest that no additional decimals be added, to encourage uniformity in these designations; note that the Chandra Source Catalog uses the same scheme. The designations are specifically intended to identify individual sources and distinguish them from each other; they are not intended to provide an accurate position.