About the EPN Database of Pulsar Profiles

The EPN database began as part of the European Pulsar Network project in 1996. The aim was to collect pulsar profiles from a large collection of pulsars and present them in a standardised format with a convenient web interface. This database has been widely used for more than 20 years. However, the Internet of 1996 is very different to the Internet of today, and the database you are now viewing is a modern reinterpretation of the idea. The EPN project has officially ended, but we keep the name for convenience.

Changes over the original database

The database you are viewing now was created by Michael Keith (University of Manchester) in 2015.

Search-able database (coming soon!)
User uploadable content - i.e. submit your own files (coming soon!)
Interactive on-line plotting
Download in PSRFITS format

Re-binning of partial profiles

Some of the old EPN data does not cover the entire pulse profile, i.e. the data only contains a fraction of the pulse. In order to process teh data with psrchive and other modern software, which expects the profiles to cover the full rotation, these data have been re-binned into a full pulse period for the psrfits and ascii download options due to the limitations of the software used (this may be improved in future versions). The origianal EPN data file is unchanged. A warning will appear on the download page where this is the case. There are some limitations of the re-binning:

EPN data can only have 4096 bins, therefore some data have been downsampled after re-binning
These data often do not have an integer number of bins per period, and thefore some interpolation has been carried out

Overall the pulse shapes should be very similar and it should not affect basic measurements, but there are likely to be some side effects, especially with polarisation profiles.

Citations and copyright

The data contained within this archive are copyrighted to the authors of the original works. The data can be downloaded subject to the appropriate license conditions. Most of the data are provided under one of two licences, either the EPN Legacy Agreement or the CC Attribution 4.0 International licence.

EPN Legacy Agreement

The original data files are provided under a good-will agreement by the authors with the following requirements:

The data that form this archive have been, or will shortly about to be, published in Scientific journals. The authors have kindly agreed to make their data available publicly. Therefore, if you intend to use any of the data as part of a publication, full credit MUST be given to the original authors. Specific information on the data for each profile can be found in the main archive browser (links are provided to the bibliographic information for each profile's published journal).

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

All new submissions to the database are licensed under a Creative Commons license. These data are identified with a "CC" logo,

Data made avaliable under this license can be used freely provided you to attribute the authors of the original data as described in the licence terms. For scientific publications we consider appropriate attribution to be:

A citation to the linked journal article for the data you are using, as specified on the download page, and

An acknowledgement or footnote explaining that the data were obtained from the EPN database under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Other licences

We may release data under other licences from time-to-time. Please contact the authors if you want to use the data in a way that is not permitted by the licence.

Acknowledgement

If you want to acknowledge general use of the EPN Database of Pulsar Profiles, we recommend the following wording:

Part of this research has made use of the EPN Database of Pulsar Profiles maintained by the University of Manchester, available at: http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/research/pulsar/Resources/epn/

Thanks

The EPN Database of Pulsar Profiles has been developed by Michael Keith at the University of Manchester. However it would not be possible without Duncan Lorimer, creator of the original EPN database, and the many authors who have contributed profiles over the years. Thank you!