Astrophysics Data System
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|
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (United States) | |
History | 1992 to present |
---|---|
Access | |
Cost | Free |
Coverage | |
Disciplines | Astronomy and physics |
Record depth | Index & abstract & full-text |
Geospatial coverage | Worldwide |
Links | |
Website | ui |
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an
Beginning in 1992, ADS is a research tool that improves astronomical research, and is specifically tailored to astronomical needs.
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) usage statistics can be used to analyze global trends in astronomical research due to it being used amongst astronomers worldwide. Those statistics revealed the direct correlation between both the number of astronomers and the amount of research an astronomer carries out and the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the country from where the scientist is based.
History
The importance of recording and classifying earlier astronomical knowledge and works was recognized in the 18th century, with Johann Friedrich Weidler publishing the first comprehensive history of astronomy in 1741 and the first astronomical bibliography in 1755. This effort was continued by Jérôme de La Lande, who published his Bibliographie astronomique in 1803, a work that covered the time from 480 B. C. to the year of publication. The Bibliographie générale de l’astronomie, Volume I and Volume II were published by J.C. Houzeau and A. Lancaster in Brussels, followed in the 1882 to 1889 period.[4][5]
As the number of astronomers and astronomical publications grew, bibliographical efforts became institutional tasks, first at the Observatoire Royal de Belgique, where the Bibliography of Astronomy was published from 1881 to 1898, and then at the Astronomischer Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg, where the yearly Astronomischer Jahresbericht was published from 1899 to 1968. After this date it was replaced by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts yearly book series which continued until the end of the 20th century.
During the 1980s, however, astronomers realized that the nascent technologies which formed the basis of the Internet could be used to build an electronic indexing system of astronomical research papers, which could allow astronomers to make extensive searches of the existing literature on any given research topic, as well as to keep abreast of a much greater range of research.[6]
The first suggestion of a database of journal paper abstracts was made at a conference on Astronomy from Large Data-Bases held in
An initial version of ADS, with a database consisting of 40 papers, was created as a proof of concept in 1988. The ADS Abstract Service was announced in November 1992 [1] and was released for general use in April 1993. The ADS database was successfully connected with the SIMBAD database in the summer of 1993. The creators believed this was the first use of the Internet to allow simultaneous querying of transatlantic scientific databases. Until 1994 the service was available via proprietary network software, but it was transferred to the nascent World Wide Web early that year. The number of users of the service quadrupled in the five weeks following the introduction of the ADS web-based service.[2]
At first, the journal articles available via ADS were
In 2011 the ADS launched ADS Labs Streamlined Search which introduced facets for query refinement and selection. In 2013 ADS Labs 2.0 featuring a new search engine, full-text search functionality, scalable facets and an API was introduced. In 2015 the new ADS, codenamed Bumblebee, was released as ADS-beta. The ADS-beta system features a microservices API and client-side dynamic page loading served on a cloud platform. In May 2018 the beta label was dropped and Bumblebee became the default ADS interface—with some legacy features (ADS Classic) remaining available.[11] Development continues to the present day, with an extensible API available: enabling users to build their own utilities on top of the ADS bibliographic record.
The ADS service is distributed worldwide, with twelve
Data in the system
Papers are indexed within the database by their bibliographic record which contains the details of the journal they were published in, and various associated metadata, such as author lists, references and citations. Originally this data was stored in ASCII format, but, eventually, the limitations of this encouraged the database maintainers to migrate all records to an XML (Extensible Markup Language) format in 2000. Bibliographic records are now stored as an XML element, with sub-elements for the various metadata.[12]
Since the advent of online editions of journals, abstracts are loaded into the ADS on or before the publication date of articles, with the full journal text available to subscribers. Older articles have been scanned, and an abstract is created using optical character recognition software. Scanned articles from before about 1995 are usually available free, by agreement with the journal publishers.[13]
Scanned articles are stored in TIFF format, at both medium and high resolution. The TIFF files are converted on demand into GIF files, for on-screen viewing, and PDF, or PostScript files for printing. The generated files are then cached to eliminate needlessly frequent regenerations for popular articles. As of 2000, ADS contained 250 GB of scans, which consisted of 1,128,955 article pages comprising 138,789 articles. By 2005 this had grown to 650 GB, and is expected to grow further, to about 900 GB by 2007.[13] No further information has been published (2005).
The database initially contained only astronomical references, but has now grown to incorporate three databases, covering astronomy references (including planetary sciences and solar physics), physics references (including instrumentation and geosciences), as well as preprints of scientific papers from arXiv. The astronomy database is by far the most advanced and its use accounts for about 85% of the total ADS usage. Articles are assigned to the different databases according to the subject rather than the journal they are published in, so that articles from any one journal might appear in all three subject databases. The separation of the databases allows searching in each discipline to be tailored, so that words can automatically be given different weight functions in different database searches, depending on how common they are in the relevant field.[12]
Data in the preprint archive is updated daily from the
Software and hardware
The software runs on a system that was written specifically for it, allowing for extensive customization for astronomical needs that would not have been possible with general purpose
The main ADS server is located at the
Indexing
ADS currently (2005) receives abstracts or tables of contents from almost two hundred journal sources. The service may receive data referring to the same article from multiple sources, and creates one bibliographic reference based on the most accurate data from each source. The common use of TeX and LaTeX by almost all scientific journals greatly facilitates the incorporation of bibliographic data into the system in a standardized format, and importing HTML-coded web-based articles is also simple. ADS utilizes Python and Perl scripts for importing, processing and standardizing bibliographic data.[12]
The apparently mundane task of converting author names into a standard
For electronic articles, a list of the references given at the end of the article is easily extracted. For scanned articles, reference extraction relies on OCR. The reference database can then be "inverted" to list the citations for each paper in the database. Citation lists have been used in the past to identify popular articles missing from the database; mostly these were from before 1975 and have now been added to the system.
Coverage
The database now contains over fifteen million articles. In the cases of the major journals of astronomy (
While the database contains the complete contents of all the major journals and many minor ones as well, its coverage of references and citations is much less complete. References in and citations of articles in the major journals are fairly complete, but references such as "private communication", "in press" or "in preparation" cannot be matched, and author errors in reference listings also introduce potential errors. Astronomical papers may cite and be cited by articles in journals which fall outside the scope of ADS, such as chemistry, mathematics or biology journals.[16]
Search engine
Since its inception, the ADS has developed a highly complex search engine to query the abstract and object databases. The search engine is tailor-made for searching astronomical abstracts, and the engine and its user interface assume that the user is well-versed in astronomy and able to interpret search results which are designed to return more than just the most relevant papers. The database can be queried for author names, astronomical object names, title words, and words in the abstract text, and results can be filtered according to a number of criteria. It works by first gathering synonyms and simplifying search terms as described above, and then generating an "inverted file", which is a list of all the documents matching each search term. The user-selected logic and filters are then applied to this inverted list to generate the final search results.[17]
Author name queries
The system indexes author names by surname and initials, and accounts for the possible variations in spelling of names using a list of variations. This is common in the case of names including accents such as umlauts and transliterations from Arabic or Cyrillic script. An example of an entry in the author synonym list is:
- AFANASJEV, V
- AFANAS’EV, V
- AFANAS’IEV, V
- AFANASEV, V
- AFANASYEV, V
- AFANS’IEV, V
- AFANSEV, V
Object name searches
The capability to search for papers on specific astronomical objects is one of ADS's most powerful tools. The system uses data from the
Title and abstract searches
The search engine first filters search terms in several ways. An M followed by a space or
Synonym replacement
Once search terms have been pre-processed, the database is queried with the revised search term, as well as synonyms for it. As well as simple
As well as English language synonyms, ADS also searches for English translations of foreign search terms and vice versa, so that a search for the French word soleil retrieves references to Sun, and papers in languages other than English can be returned by English search terms.
Synonym replacement can be disabled if required, so that a rare term which is a synonym of a much more common term (such as 'dateline' rather than 'date') can be searched for specifically.
Selection logic
The search engine allows selection
Result filtering
Search results can be filtered according to a number of criteria, including specifying a range of years such as '1945 to 1975', '2000 to the present day' or 'before 1900', and what type of journal the article appears in [–] non-peer-reviewed articles such as conference proceedings. These can be excluded or specifically searched for, or specific journals can be included in or excluded from the search.
Search results
Although it was conceived as a means of accessing abstracts and papers, ADS provides a substantial amount of ancillary information along with search results. For each abstract returned, links are provided to other papers in the database which are referenced, and which cite the paper, and a link is provided to a preprint, where one exists. The system also generates a link to 'also-read' articles – that is, those which have been most commonly accessed by those reading the article. In this way, an ADS user can determine which papers are of most interest to astronomers who are interested in the subject of a given paper.[17]
Also returned are links to the
Impact on astronomy
ADS is almost universally used as a research tool among astronomers, and there are several studies that have estimated quantitatively how much more efficient ADS has made astronomy; one estimated that ADS increased the efficiency of astronomical research by 333 full-time equivalent research years per year,[2] and another found that in 2002 its effect was equivalent to 736 full-time researchers, or all the astronomical research done in France.[3] ADS has allowed literature searches that would previously have taken days or weeks to carry out to be completed in seconds, and it is estimated that ADS has increased the readership and use of the astronomical literature by a factor of about three since its inception.[3]
In monetary terms, this increase in efficiency represents a considerable amount. There are about 12,000 active astronomical researchers worldwide, so ADS is the equivalent of about 5% of the working population of astronomers. The global astronomical research budget is estimated at between 4,000 and US$5,000 million,[20] so the value of ADS to astronomy would be about 200–250 million USD annually. Its operating budget is a small fraction of this amount.[3]
The great importance of ADS to astronomers has been recognized by the United Nations, the General Assembly of which has commended ADS on its work and success, particularly noting its importance to astronomers in the developing world, in reports of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. A 2002 report by a visiting committee to the Center for Astrophysics, meanwhile, said that the service had "revolutionized the use of the astronomical literature", and was "probably the most valuable single contribution to astronomy research that the CfA has made in its lifetime".[21]
Sociological studies using ADS
Because it is used almost universally by astronomers, ADS can reveal much about how astronomical research is distributed around the world. Most users access the system from institutes of higher education, whose
ADS has also been used to show that the fraction of single-author astronomy papers has decreased substantially since 1975 and that astronomical papers with more than 50 authors have become more common since 1990.[22]
See also
- List of academic databases and search engines
- Bibcode
- INSPIRE-HEP
- NASA Planetary Data System (PDS)
- PubMed
- Michael J. Kurtz
References
- ^ Bibcode:1993ASPC...52..132K.
- ^ S2CID 17583122.
- ^ )
- ^ Houzeau, J. C. (1887). Bibliographie générale de l'astronomie (in French). F. Hayez, Imprimeur de L'Académie Royale de Belgique.
- ^ Houzeau, Jean-Charles (1882). Bibliographie générale de l'astronomie ou catalogue méthodique des ouvrages, des mémoires et des observations astronomiques publiés depuis l'origine de l'imprimerie jusqu'en 1880: Mémoires et notices insérés dans les Collections académiques et les Revues (in French).
- Bibcode:1992ASPC...25...35G.
- Bibcode:1988ESOC...28..489S.
- Bibcode:1988ESOC...28..143A.
- Bibcode:1988ESOC...28..453R.
- Bibcode:1988ESOC...28..459R.
- Bibcode:2018AAS...23136217A.
- ^ S2CID 7182316.
- ^ a b c d "NASA ADS Abstract Service Mirroring Information". Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 23 June 2005. Retrieved 2 November 2008.
- ^ myADS-arXiv: A fully customized, open access virtual journal. March Meeting 2007, American Physical Society. Vol. 52. U20.9. Retrieved 30 October 2008.
- ^ "SAO/NASA ADS at SAO: Mirror Sites". Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Archived from the original on 27 February 2008. Retrieved 30 October 2008.
- ^ "ADS Bibliographic Codes: Journal Abbreviations". Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Archived from the original on 30 April 2008. Retrieved 30 October 2008.
- ^ S2CID 2787647.
- ^ "SAO/NASA ADS HELP: Abstract Query Form". Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 2.2.2.2 - SIMBAD/NED/LPI/IAUC Object Names/Position. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 30 October 2008.
- ^ "SAO/NASA ADS HELP: Abstract Query Form". Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 2.2.1.2 - Stop Words. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 30 October 2008.
- Bibcode:1998ASPC..139..243W.
- ^ "ADS Awards and Recognition". Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
- S2CID 122859920.