New Students Guide

This guide is perpetual work in progress.

1.  PSRRefs

When writing papers/thesis/etc in L^AT_EX, you will inevitably need to add references to pulsar related papers and books. The main pulsar archive of bibliographic entries is a bibtex file called psrrefs.bib. This file contains entries for nearly every pulsar related paper, however it is updated slowly. Therefore, there are often additional appendices added, usually called modrefs.bib. psrrefs is usualy considered to be a read only file, so if you want to add new entries, add them to the appropriate modrefs file.

At JBO, this is stored at /psr/tex/bib/psrrefs.bib

There is now also an online version of psrrefs, avaliable at http://www.pulsarastronomy.net/psrrefs/ This is searchable and editable, a handy resource for finding the bibtex code a particular paper. Note that this includes entries from psrrefs and modrefs.

2.  Data formats, archives and software

Pulsar data has many different data formats and software, most of which is not used outside of pulsar astronomy. Luckily however, most software packages will read and write many different data formats, care is advised however as sometimes they do not read/write them in the same way!

• The most common data formats are listed under DataFormats
• See the software page for common pulsar software packages.

3.  Catalogues

There are some very useful catalogues of pulsar details.

• PSRCAT - This is the largest and most complete catalogue of pulsar details, hosted at the ATNF. PSRCAT has a command line interface and a web interface. The web interface covers nearly all published pulsar parameters, however new sources that are unpublished are missing from the catalogue. The command line tool can be very up to date (including unconfirmed sources), provided the database files are updated regularly. The most up to date catalogue is generally only available from ATNF machines.
• EPN Database - This is a database of pulse profiles from the European Pulsar Network. This database has a large and valuable collection of profile information for many pulsars.