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.

• [ ]
  Can the editor please suggest if additional context can be allowed? The paper is already above the required word limit.

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

• Added under Statement of need:
  "While excellent tools exist (above) for Spherical Harmonic operation, PySHbundle provides familiarity of existing and beginner level users by focusing on GRACE applications, and translating the legacy software, SHbundle."

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/."