Best Practices for Data Publication to Facilitate Integration into NED: A Reference Guide for Authors

We provide an overview of challenges encountered in ongoing efforts to improve the automation, efficiency, and accuracy of the procedures required to extract, transform, cross-identify, and integrate data from the electronic astrophysics literature into the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). Recommendations for best practices for publishing data are provided, from the perspective of the NED team, to serve as a reference guide for authors, referees and editors of astrophysics journal articles. Also included are examples of problematic displays of data in the literature.