Referencing Sources of Molecular Spectroscopic Data in the Era of Data Science: Application to the HITRAN and AMBDAS Databases

Abstract

The application described has been designed to create bibliographic entries in large databases with diverse sources automatically, which reduces both the frequency of mistakes and the workload for the administrators. This new system uniquely identifies each reference from its digital object identifier (DOI) and retrieves the corresponding bibliographic information from any of several online services, including the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data Systems (ADS) and CrossRef APIs. Once parsed into a relational database, the software is able to produce bibliographies in any of several formats, including HTML and BibTeX, for use on websites or printed articles. The application is provided free-of-charge for general use by any scientific database. The power of this application is demonstrated when used to populate reference data for the HITRAN and AMBDAS databases as test cases. HITRAN contains data that is provided by researchers and collaborators throughout the spectroscopic community. These contributors are accredited for their contributions through the bibliography produced alongside the data returned by an online search in HITRAN. Prior to the work presented here, HITRAN and AMBDAS created these bibliographies manually, which is a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone process. The complete code for the new referencing system can be found on the HITRANonline GitHub website.