Acknowledging/Citing Bilby

If you have used Bilby in your scientific work, please acknowledge us in your papers/proposals by citing the Bilby paper and Zenodo DOI. We recommend citing the DOI for the specific version used. For example:

@article{bilby_paper,
    author = "Ashton, Gregory and others",
    title = "{BILBY: A user-friendly Bayesian inference library for gravitational-wave astronomy}",
    eprint = "1811.02042",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "astro-ph.IM",
    doi = "10.3847/1538-4365/ab06fc",
    journal = "Astrophys. J. Suppl.",
    volume = "241",
    number = "2",
    pages = "27",
    year = "2019"
}

@software{bilby_doi,
    author       = {Colm Talbot and
                    Gregory Ashton and
                    Moritz Hübner and
                    Matt Pitkin and
                    plasky and
                    Michael J. Williams and
                    asb5468 and
                    Aditya Vijaykumar and
                    Rory Smith and
                    SMorisaki and
                    John Veitch and
                    Nikhil Sarin and
                    Duncan Macleod and
                    Daniel Williams and
                    JasperMartins and
                    MarcArene and
                    C P L Berry and
                    Vivien Raymond and
                    Ceciliogq and
                    Ivan Markin and
                    David Keitel and
                    AlexandreGoettel and
                    Lorenzo Pompili and
                    Mick Wright and
                    oliviawilk and
                    noahewolfe and
                    jacobgolomb and
                    Shichao Wu and
                    Rhiannon Udall and
                    Michael Pürrer},
    title        = {bilby-dev/bilby: v.2.7.1},
    month        = nov,
    year         = 2025,
    publisher    = {Zenodo},
    version      = {v2.7.1},
    doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.17533961},
    url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17533961},
    swhid        = {swh:1:dir:3840032346ac7f56582e6c74cc48dccc33747418
                    ;origin=https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14025463;vi
                    sit=swh:1:snp:b4b0318c71303094707fd61e3305dd2addf1
                    a743;anchor=swh:1:rel:7b67a76d1e7e224899d337492665
                    5fa8e0e7074c;path=bilby-dev-bilby-710e180
                    },
    }

Please also consider citing other papers and packages listed below when relevant.

Bilby pipe and parallel bilby

Additionally, if you used bilby_pipe or parallel_bilby, please cite appropriate papers mentioned below

@article{bilby_pipe_paper,
    author = "Romero-Shaw, I. M. and others",
    title = "{Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO\textendash{}Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue}",
    eprint = "2006.00714",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "astro-ph.IM",
    doi = "10.1093/mnras/staa2850",
    journal = "Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc.",
    volume = "499",
    number = "3",
    pages = "3295--3319",
    year = "2020"
}

@article{pbilby_paper,
    author = "Smith, Rory J. E. and Ashton, Gregory and Vajpeyi, Avi and Talbot, Colm",
    title = "{Massively parallel Bayesian inference for transient gravitational-wave astronomy}",
    eprint = "1909.11873",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    reportNumber = "LIGO Document P1900255-v1",
    doi = "10.1093/mnras/staa2483",
    journal = "Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc.",
    volume = "498",
    number = "3",
    pages = "4492--4502",
    year = "2020"
}

Accelerated likelihoods

If you use any of the accelerated likelihoods like ROQGravitationalWaveTransient, MBGravitationalWaveTransient, RelativeBinningGravitationalWaveTransient etc., please cite the following papers in addition to the above.

  • ROQGravitationalWaveTransient

 @article{roq_paper_1,
    author = {Smith, Rory and Field, Scott E. and Blackburn, Kent and Haster, Carl-Johan and P\"urrer, Michael and Raymond, Vivien and Schmidt, Patricia},
    title = "{Fast and accurate inference on gravitational waves from precessing compact binaries}",
    eprint = "1604.08253",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    reportNumber = "LIGO-DOCUMENT-NUMBER-P1600096, LIGO-P1600096",
    doi = "10.1103/PhysRevD.94.044031",
    journal = "Phys. Rev. D",
    volume = "94",
    number = "4",
    pages = "044031",
    year = "2016"
}

@article{roq_paper_2,
    author = "Morisaki, Soichiro and Smith, Rory and Tsukada, Leo and Sachdev, Surabhi and Stevenson, Simon and Talbot, Colm and Zimmerman, Aaron",
    title = "{Rapid localization and inference on compact binary coalescences with the Advanced LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave detector network}",
    eprint = "2307.13380",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    doi = "10.1103/PhysRevD.108.123040",
    journal = "Phys. Rev. D",
    volume = "108",
    number = "12",
    pages = "123040",
    year = "2023"
}

  • MBGravitationalWaveTransient

@article{mb_paper,
    author = "Morisaki, Soichiro",
    title = "{Accelerating parameter estimation of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence using adaptive frequency resolutions}",
    eprint = "2104.07813",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    doi = "10.1103/PhysRevD.104.044062",
    journal = "Phys. Rev. D",
    volume = "104",
    number = "4",
    pages = "044062",
    year = "2021"
}

  • RelativeBinningGravitationalWaveTransient

@article{relbin_bilby,
    author = "Krishna, Kruthi and Vijaykumar, Aditya and Ganguly, Apratim and Talbot, Colm and Biscoveanu, Sylvia and George, Richard N. and Williams, Natalie and Zimmerman, Aaron",
    title = "{Accelerated parameter estimation in Bilby with relative binning}",
    eprint = "2312.06009",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    month = "12",
    year = "2023"
}

@article{relbin_cornish,
    author = "Cornish, Neil J.",
    title = "{Fast Fisher Matrices and Lazy Likelihoods}",
    eprint = "1007.4820",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    month = "7",
    year = "2010"
}

@article{relbin_zackay,
    author = "Zackay, Barak and Dai, Liang and Venumadhav, Tejaswi",
    title = "{Relative Binning and Fast Likelihood Evaluation for Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation}",
    eprint = "1806.08792",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "astro-ph.IM",
    month = "6",
    year = "2018"
}

If you use the bilby_mcmc sampler, please additionally cite the following paper

@article{bilby_mcmc_paper,
    author = "Ashton, Gregory and Talbot, Colm",
    title = "{B\,ilby-MCMC: an MCMC sampler for gravitational-wave inference}",
    eprint = "2106.08730",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    doi = "10.1093/mnras/stab2236",
    journal = "Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc.",
    volume = "507",
    number = "2",
    pages = "2037--2051",
    year = "2021"
}

Other packages

Additionally, bilby builds on a number of open-source packages. If you make use of this functionality in your publications, we recommend you cite them as requested in their associated documentation.

General

Samplers

Gravitational-wave tools

If using Bilby for gravitational-wave inference, please also considering citing

and the paper(s) for any waveforms used.

Plotting