Ivelina Momcheva edited Introduction.tex  almost 9 years ago

Commit id: fcaaa07fe8a177c7d26540eb1fad9b9b0e35900e

deletions | additions      

       

have \section{Introduction} \label{sec:intro}  Much of modern Astronomy research depends on software. Digital images and numerical simulations are central to the work of most astronomers today, and anyone who is actively involved in astronomy research has a variety of software techniques in their toolbox. Yet we know few details about the software practices of astronomers. In this work we aim to gain a greater understanding the prevalence of software tools, the demographics of their users, and the level of software training in astronomy. 

Motivated by these issues and related discussions during the .Astronomy 6 conference, we created a survey to explore software use in astronomy. In this paper, we discuss the methodology of the survey in \S \ref{sec:datamethods}, the results from the multiple-choice sections in \S \ref{sec:res}, a discussion of the free-form comments in \S \ref{sec:comments}, in \S \ref{sec:ssicompare} we compare our results to the aforementioned SSI survey, and in \S \ref{sec:conc} we conclude.  Additionally, we have made the anonymized results of the survey (as of the time of this writing) and the code to generate the summary figures available at \url{https://github.com/eteq/software_survey_analysis}. This repository may be updated in the future if a significant number of new respondents fill out the survey\footnote{\url{https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SgdebWYHqMsDTS6Y1GRVQ2H4S-ncCz_VoWpJQd1YX9o/viewform}}.