Registering your code on ascl.net

In the last lesson we saw how to obtain a DOI by uploading a software project to Zenodo. In this lesson we’ll make an entry in the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL.net), which is indexed by ADS, and can help you gain an audience, and track citations.

Submit a code to ASCL

Go to the “submit a code” page here.

The page asks for a title, credit (authors/contributors), abstract, and a site list for the code.

The site list should be a list of links to places where people can obtain the code. I highly recommend that you put a link to both your Github and Zenodo repositories. If the code was described in a paper you can put that in the “Preferred Citation Method” section.

ASCL.net does not store your code. No one will vet the quality of your code. ASCL.net is simply a place to register that some code exists and that you’d like to be acknowledged for creating/contributing. ASCL.net is indexed by ADS so it will get a bibcode in ADS, which can then be used to generate a bibtex entry for people to use when citing your code. Another goal of ASCL.net is to make it easier for people to find your code in the first place. If you haven’t explored the code available here I recommend that you do so now – there are some gems.

You can also get a nice little badge from ASCL to add to your README.md file!