Selection criteria and procedure

For the inclusion in our list of ``WR galaxies'' the criteria are 1) the presence of broad emission at 4686 Å due to HeII, or 2) a broad ``WR bump'' at 4660 Å, or 3) other broad emission lines attributed to WR stars. The second criterion accounts for the difficulty of resolving HeII 4686 from other emission lines in medium resolution spectra (see e.g. Kunth & Joubert 1985), but may in some cases introduce objects where nebular emission lines dominate the WR bump. Implicitly both criteria 1) and 2) were adopted in the earlier compilation of Conti (1991). The third criterion allows for objects where broad carbon lines (e.g. CIII 5696, CIV 5808) presumably from WR stars are detected. In practice only one case (NGC 1365 for which no blue spectrum was available) falls in this category.

The presence/absence of features and their qualification (broad and/or nebular) is generally not fully objective (see Sect. 2 for more details). Furthermore in many cases the spectra are not available for inspection. We therefore follow the procedure or judgement of the authors of the original publication.

All objects resulting from this selection are listed in Table . Obviously most of the objects appear in various catalogues. We have chose the following labeling priority: first the Messier number, then the NGC, the Markarian, the Zwicky lists, or finally other labels (UM, Tol, SBS, etc). Often several regions in the same object show WR features. In this case only the main object name is listed (column 1); information about the different regions are given in Sect. 4.

The general properties of objects, equatorial coordinates (equinox 1950, cols. 2 and 3), morphological type (col. 4), apparent blue magnitude (col. 5), and heliocentric radial velocity (col. 6) have been extracted from NED. Column 7 gives the reference of the first publication indicating the presence of broad HeII 4686. ``(C91)'' indicates that this objects was already included in the compilation of Conti (1991). Col. 8 gives information about the existence of nebular HeII 4686 (see footnote of the Table for the keys). The source of this information is found under the remarks on each individual object (Sect. 4). Col. 9 gives the reference to the first detection of broad CIV 5808 (exceptionally also other broad features, cf. NGC 1365).

Our current compilation (Table ) includes 139 WR galaxies (cf. 37 WR galaxies in Conti 1991). Among them 57 objects show also broad CIV 5808 features. In addition to the broad (stellar) HeII 4686 emission, a nebular HeII component is well established (suspected) in 44 (54) objects.

The database will be made available electronically at the CDS and through the Web. It is our intention to update the catalogue in the future by this means.