Maintaining the publications gallery

Introduction

The Publications Gallery is part of the community section on the SKIRT web site. It lists peer-reviewed papers that describe aspects of the SKIRT code or report on its use in science applications or technical studies.

The gallery offers different views on the same publications database. The default view shows a table where each paper is visually represented by (part of) a key figure. Links under each figure point to a PDF version of the paper and to its ADS abstract page. This view provides an overall impression and showcases the diversity of SKIRT-related papers. The other gallery views offer text tables with different subsets and sorting orders of the papers in the database. These views facilitate searching for a specific paper or subject area.

The HTML pages for these various views are automatically created by a Python script based on information in a text file (the core database) and a set of corresponding .pdf and .png files (additional resources). The Python script is executed as part of the procedure for staging the web site (see Updating the web site). The core database and additional resources must be manually prepared and maintained on a regular basis to add recently published papers.

Note

By convention, the publications gallery includes only peer-reviewed, accepted publications that are listed in the ADS database with their final bibcode reference (i.e. excluding arXiv or other temporary references).

The core database

The core data base is a manually edited text file, unsurprisingly called PublicationsDatabase.txt, with the formal structure shown and described below.

# Title (full title)
# Authors ("First et al." or "First and Second"; last names only)
# Journal (abbreviation)
# Month Year (decimal numbers seperated by space)
# Category (Technical or Application)
# Filename (filename body without directory nor filename extension)
# ADS (bibcode reference without the other portions of the URL)

The multi-wavelength Tully-Fisher relation in the TNG50 cosmological simulation
Baes et al.
A&A
04 2025
Application
Baes2025
2025A&A...696A..52B

Direct imaging of active galactic nucleus outflows and their origin with the 23 m Large Binocular Telescope
Isbell et al.
NatAs
03 2025
Application
Isbell2025
2025NatAs...9..417I

...
SKIRT 9: Redesigning an advanced dust radiative transfer code to allow kinematics, line transfer and polarization by aligned dust grains
Camps and Baes
A&C
04 2020
Technical
Camps2020
2020A&C....3100381C

...

Each paper is represented by a block of 8 lines, as summarized in the file header. The order of these blocks is not significant (the Python script will sort them appropriately), but the convention is to add new papers at the top, just below the file header, in approximate reverse publication date order.

The 8 lines in each block provide the following information, which can be readily copied from ADS:

1. Title: the full title of the paper. Even if the title is very long, it must be listed on a single line.
2. Authors: last name ony. If there is a single author, use "First"; if there are two authors, use "First and Second"; if there are three or more authors, use "First et al.".
3. Journal: abbreviation of the journal name. Wherever possible, use the official shorthand employed by ADS.
4. Month Year: publication month (two decimal digits) and year (four decimal digits) seperated by a space.
5. Category: use "Technical" for papers that describe a technical aspect of the SKIRT code; use "Application" for all other papers.
6. Filename: filename body without directory nor filename extension. The name is extended with ".pdf" to locate the PDF version of the paper, and with ".png" to locate the figure representing the paper in the default gallery view. By convention, use the first author's last name after removing any spacing, punctuation and diacritical marks, followed by the year, and possibly followed by a lowercase letter (a, b, c, ...) to disambiguate multiple papers by the same author in the same year.
7. ADS: the final, offical ADS bibcode reference without the other portions of the URL. Papers with arXiv or other temporary references should not (yet) be included in the database.
8. Empty line

Additional resources

The .pdf and .png files corresponding to the entries in the core publication data base must be obtained manually and placed in the ~/SKIRT/ResourcesC/Publications directory. These files must then be published to the data file server through a seperate procedure (see Updating the web site).

Some areas of note:

• Use the exact filename specified in line 6 of the corresponding core database entry, extended with ".pdf" and ".png" respectively.
• Download the PDF file including the accepted paper from the official journal web site. Do not use the arXiv version, except in rare cases where the UGent does not have a subscription and you cannot otherwise obtain the offical PDF version.
• For the PNG file, select a figure in the paper that seems representative for its key results or for its use of SKIRT. Use a screen grab utility to copy (a portion of) this figure. Ensure that the grabbed portion is legible on the scale it will be shown in the default gallery view. Also, zoom in or out to adjust the pixel size of the grabbed portion, keeping the file size below 500 KB.