AASTeX information for authors
AASTeX is a LaTeX-based package that can be used to mark up manuscripts for American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals. AASTeX enables you to prepare manuscripts and tables for electronic submission to The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Journal, as well as some non-AAS journals like the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The current version of the package is AASTeX v5.2.
If you want to download the AASTeX package, go to Downloads. For sample documents and details on how to prepare a manuscript in AASTeX, see the Documentation section. Follow the links to the journal home pages for specific submissions guidelines for the ApJ, AJ, and PASP.
If you need help with installation or manuscript preparation, consult the AASTeX FAQ or send an e-mail to the help desk at aastex-help@aas.org.
Latest features for AASTeX submissions
Data behind the figures
There have always been data in the journals, in the form of tables and images. Much of the data that the journals handle is explicitly tabular, and is therefore easy to exchange and manage using the wide array of mature systems available to the community. The AAS journals are pleased to accept this data, with the proviso that the journals are not data centers, so large data sets should be submitted to a suitable data repository and referred to from articles.The journals would like to have more of the numerical data that underlie figures in the journals, figures that represent highly reduced and analyzed results – “graphics“ or “line art,“ rather than images or halftones. If the data that you used to make your plot can be represented in a tabular form – wavelength vs. flux, time vs. intensity, color vs. color, etc. – please consider collecting it in a FITS table, so that the data themselves can be provided along with the figure in the journal. If you have questions about what formats the journals will accept, or about the most effective way to represent the data, please send them to the AAS journals scientist, Dr. Greg Schwarz.
Large figure sets
The AAS journals now authors the option of publishing large sets of online-only figures in the electronic edition. For a recent example, see the Figure Set in the paper by Tommasin et al. in the Tbe Astrophysical Journal. To facilitate submission of these large figure sets, the AAS has created a set of macros that should be used for marking up the figure set file name, caption, and label information in AASTeX. See the Figure Set documentation for more information.
Data set linking
In partnership with the NASA Astronomical Data Service (ADS) and several NASA data centers, the AAS has a new project to allow authors to tag data sets from participating data centers in their papers using the AASTeX “\dataset” macro.
Data sets tagged with the “\dataset” macro will appear in the electronic edition linked to a name resolver at ADS that will take readers to the data sets themselves.
See the Data Set Linking page for more information.
Author charge estimation
Beginning in 2011, author charges for AAS journals are calculated using digital elements of the submitted manuscript. Invoices will be generated from the final XML version of the manuscript, after it has been accepted and copy edited. We offer an author charge estimator that can be used with your AASTeX file, so that authors can get a sense of what the author fees will be.