Impact and Health

The figures on this page give a sense of the level of impact the astropy codebase has on the astronomy community and research in the field, as well as the amount of development effort contributed over time (the codebase’s “health”). Assessments of The Astropy Project’s engagement with the diverse astronomy community are an equally important but separate consideration and are detailed in:

• Astropy community engagement study

• Astropy diversity, equity and inclusion study

Concerning the codebase, a major positive trend is that citations to astropy, as a proxy for its usage in research, have been consistently growing since The Astropy Project was created. However, the amount of developer resources has remained small, with a limited number of volunteer maintainers met with an increasing amount of development responsibility. Hence, we welcome any help that you can give!

First considering the citations, this figure estimates astropy’s usage in astronomy research by its yearly publication impact, using citations drawn from the NASA ADS database. The continual growth in citations shows the broad and increasing usage of astropy in astronomy and scientific research, as well as the high impact that contributions to astropy can have.

To next visualize the size of the developer community contributing to the astropy core library, this figure shows the number of people authoring commits over time. While each year astropy is cited more in papers, the amount of developers and especially those contributing multiple times is modest and largely static.

The workload to maintain astropy can be traced through the number of issues and pull requests open and closed in the astropy core library over time. The long-term increase in overall pull requests, along with a comparable amount of opens and closes on average, shows that the small number of maintainers is increasingly taxed. The discrepancy between issue opens and closes over time reinforces this.

In short, astropy would greatly benefit from more developers, whose contributions would reach a significant fraction of research in astronomy. This figure shows the number of open issues and pull requests for each subpackage in astropy. In addition to indicating which functionalities are used more heavily by the community at present, it gives a sense of where you could start if you’re interested in contributing to astropy.