joss review 7550

[MMesch]

Hi all,

Thanks for making this code available! I have started going through the article and the code and will open issues as I'm working through it. I already opened a PR #137 with some small suggestions for paper.md. A few more that I couldn't address immediately are below:

More superficial remarks:

• a short explanation or reference for JPL MASCONS would be nice;
• "to obtain Level 2 (L2) GRACE Spherical Harmonics data" maybe add whether these are the actual coefficients;

Deeper content remarks:

• as it stands, the paper is very terse and seems to be mostly meant as a reference that can be cited. That's fine if it's OK for JOSS, but my feeling is that for many readers a little more context would be useful. I also think it can be accomplished without making the article too long for the initiated. Personally, I would suggest using modern writing tools such as LLMs, of course under guidance, validation and injection of knowledge, to achieve this.
• add a paragraph about what differentiates pyshbundle from other options for spherical harmonics analysis that were cited.
• incorporating a short code example would be nice as well.
• adding a paragraph about how the software was validated would be useful. For example, with benchmarks against other results or other types of tests.

[lsmvivek]

More superficial remarks:

1. a short explanation or reference for JPL MASCONS would be nice;

• Reference added

2. "to obtain Level 2 (L2) GRACE Spherical Harmonics data" maybe add whether these are the actual coefficients;

• Explicitly mentioned the solutions as:
  "to obtain Level 2 (L2) the Spherical harmonic coefficients and standard deviations of the static gravity field, for a particular time period"

Deeper content remarks:

3. as it stands, the paper is very terse and seems to be mostly meant as a reference that can be cited. That's fine if it's OK for JOSS, but my feeling is that for many readers a little more context would be useful. I also think it can be accomplished without making the article too long for the initiated. Personally, I would suggest using modern writing tools such as LLMs, of course under guidance, validation and injection of knowledge, to achieve this.

• todo

4. add a paragraph about what differentiates pyshbundle from other options for spherical harmonics analysis that were cited.

• todo

5. incorporating a short code example would be nice as well.

• Examples already present in examples/ and mentioned under Implementation: 4. shutils in paper

6. adding a paragraph about how the software was validated would be useful. For example, with benchmarks against other results or other types of tests.

• Added the paragraph under Implementation.
  "The accuracy of the core capabilites of pyshbundle was evaluated against the MATLAB software SHbundle. For more details please see the jupyter notebook examples/validation_pyshbundle.ipynb and the corresponding python unit tests in tests/."