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Introducing the NASA Science Explorer Ambassador Program
06 Mar 2024

Introducing the NASA Science Explorer Ambassador Program The NASA Science Explorer (SciX) team is thrilled to announce the launch of the SciX Ambassador Program! This initiative marks a new chapter in the evolution of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)...

Informed Transformation: User Feedback’s Role in the ADS to SciX Transition
26 Feb 2024

The virtual gathering of the Astrophysics Data System Users Group (ADSUG) on 16-17 November served as a pivotal moment in our ongoing transition from the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) to the NASA Science Explorer (SciX). A crucial precursor to this...

Join NASA ADS/Science Explorer (SciX) at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Conference
03 Jan 2024

Join us at the 243rd American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting from 7-11 January 2024 in New Orleans, LA for an insightful exploration of the NASA Science Explorer (SciX) and the implications of its recent launch for the ADS user community....

Join us at the AGU Fall Meeting for the NASA Science Explorer (SciX) Launch
06 Dec 2023

The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting is taking place next week (11-15 December) in San Francisco. Join the ADS team as we unveil the much-anticipated NASA Science Explorer (SciX). We will showcase SciX throughout the meeting; here’s a detailed breakdown...

SciX Models and Datasets
23 Oct 2023

Introduction The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) has been developing Natural Language Processing tools and datasets to further enhance its data holdings and services. As part of this effort, we have been building and curating datasets to train deep learning...

Announcing the NASA Science Explorer
19 Apr 2023

Did you know that 2023 is the year of Open Science in the United States, and that NASA is leading the effort with its Open-Source Science Initiative (OSSI)? The initiative aims to make publicly funded scientific research transparent, inclusive, accessible,...

The ADS Curation Model
20 Mar 2023

Introduction The basic intellectual structure of the ADS can be described using a bullseye model, represented by figure 1. The three rings in this diagram represent different levels of curation applied to the bibliographic content in the ADS. Levels of...

Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) Integration in ADS Search and Discovery
29 Dec 2022

The ADS Team is working in collaboration with Pavlos Protopapas and Ben Yuen of Harvard University to pilot the integration of the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) into ADS search and discovery for new, future, and legacy literature. ADS users will...

ADS Docmatcher
28 Sep 2022

The primary aim of the Docmatcher pipeline is to match arXiv preprints to the peer-reviewed published version, and vice versa. ADS previously used the ADS Classic ingest system to accomplish this, however with recent updates and developments to the ADS...

The ADS Object Search: How to Find Astronomical Objects in the Literature
06 Sep 2022

Searching for publications that mention, in some way, a specific astronomical object is one of the common use cases of the ADS. This blog aims to illustrate some of the caveats associated with these types of queries and provide some...

Identifying ADS Bibliographic Gaps Against NASA Ames Space Sciences and Astrobiology Division (ARC/SSAD)
12 Nov 2021

Recently NASA has asked the Astrophysics Data System to develop a plan to expand its service from Astrophysics to cover all five scientific disciplines supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (Heliophysics, Planetary Science, Astrophysics, Earth Science, Biophysics). The initial phase...

Introducing ADS’s OpenAPI Description and Documentation
04 Aug 2021

ADS’s API, or application programming interface, is the service that accepts requests and returns the requested information. For example, when a user searches in ADS, the website sends a search request to the API, which performs the search and returns...

Affiliation data in the ADS: a work in progress
15 Apr 2021

We publicly introduced our affiliations feature in a blog post last year, including a discussion of how the feature was built and maintained, and how you can use it in your literature searches. We want to reintroduce this feature, especially...

Introducing the New myADS
10 Aug 2020

Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma is an astrophysicist and the Software Development & Operations Lead for the NASA Astrophysics Data System, based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is pleased to introduce the new myADS email notification system!...

Updates to ADS: myADS Notifications, Library Collaborators, and More
29 May 2020

A number of changes have come to ADS over the past few months, some of which you may have missed. Read on for an overview of some of the bigger updates to the site. If you want to stay up...

NASA and Open Access Publishing
06 Apr 2020

Introduction NASA has long been a (some would say the) leader in providing open access to scientific data. This commitment continues with the recent whitepaper: NASA’s Science Mission Directorate’s Strategy for Data Management and Computing for Groundbreaking Science 2019-2024, by...

Affiliation searches: the Why, What, and How of our Canonical Affiliation Feature
15 Jan 2020

One of the features new to ADS since the new interface has launched is search and organization by institutional affiliation. The 15 million publications in ADS have more than 35 million combined author affiliations. The ADS has long wanted to...

A Final Farewell to ADS Classic
28 Oct 2019

ADS Classic is officially retiring on October 31, 2019 after more than 25 years in service. Its replacement, the new ADS, has been in the works for a decade, with the current iteration, originally codenamed Bumblebee, in development since 2015....

User-Developed Tools for ADS
30 Jul 2019

ADS was started in the late 1980s by astronomers, for astronomers, and has long received public funding via NASA grants. This history has meant that we’ve long been open to community involvement, and we’ve taken this a step further with...

Ave Atque Vale: ADS Classic (1992-2019)
30 May 2019

ADS Classic, a pioneer of the Information Age, died at 3:19 pm EDT on 30 May 2019 after a long period on life support. Perhaps the last of its generation to succumb to the infirmities of age, Classic is survived...

A Reminder About Transitioning to the New ADS
11 Apr 2019

Update (September 11, 2019) This post has been updated with the latest schedule. Some links have been updated. Update (May 29, 2019) This post has been updated to reflect that the library set operations and the “perform actions on selected...

Citations to Astronomy Journals 3: Journal Impact
26 Mar 2019

This is the third of a series of blog posts measuring the journals that publish astronomy research articles, using citation statistics with a number of different indices. In this post we discuss per article citation rates and how these can...

Updates to the new ADS: Affiliations, Software Citations and More
13 Feb 2019

We’ve rolled out a number of changes to the new ADS over the summer and fall, some of which you’ve likely noticed and others which may have passed you by. Read on for a summary of some of the bigger...

Citations to Astronomy Journals 2: Ranking the Journals
22 Oct 2018

This is the second of a series of blog posts measuring the journals that publish astronomy research articles, using citation statistics with a number of different indices. In this post, we examine the performance of individual journals with respect to...

Citations to Astronomy Journals 1: The growth of interdisciplinarity
20 Aug 2018

This is the first of a series of blog posts measuring the journals which publish research astronomy articles, using citation statistics. In this post we describe the measurement process and the sample. The tables with the entire data set used...

What We Wish We'd Known: 3 Former Astronomers Turned ADS Staff Share Their Wishlists
06 Aug 2018

Though the vast majority of astronomy researchers, faculty, and students worldwide use ADS on a daily or weekly basis, most stick with searching on a combination of first author name and publication year for a known paper. While this is...

How research on multiple and interacting galaxies evolved: an epistemological and bibliometric investigation
17 Jul 2018

Introduction Authors publish because they want to transfer information. They have been doing so for centuries, resulting in a vast body of scholarly literature, recording the emergence and evolution of a broad spectrum of ideas and quests for answers. This...

The New ADS Loses Its Beta Label
24 May 2018

Update (April 12, 2019) Classic’s retirement timeline has been adjusted slightly. We plan to begin disabling searching in Classic in May 2019, with full site retirement slated for Q3 2019. For more on steps to take before that time, see...

Classic ADS and the New ADS: A Look Under the Hood
24 May 2018

In this post, we’d like to give you a peek under the hood of both ADS Classic and the new ADS service. ADS Classic ADS Classic went online on the nascent World Wide Web in 1994. In the early 1990s,...

Bumblebee Updates: Metadata-Only Searches and More
11 Apr 2018

We’ve released a major update to the new ADS Bumblebee interface this week! Some changes, such as the inclusion of a wider range of export formats, incorporate functionality from ADS Classic, while others improve the user’s site experience. Read on...

Asclepias - Enabling software citation & discovery workflows
05 Feb 2018

Soon, if not already, the research lifecycle will be fully digital. Every stage can be captured by one or more digital objects, each of which carries specific knowledge with regards to that stage. The most obvious inhabitant of this digital...

ADS Bumblebee: What to Look Forward to in 2018
02 Jan 2018

ADS Beta, codenamed Bumblebee, is nearing parity with ADS Classic! The ADS development team has been working on Bumblebee since 2015, an outgrowth of earlier efforts (ADS Labs, ADS 2.0) to modernize the look and capabilities of ADS. While Classic...

ADS Welcomes Its Users Group for Their Second Annual Meeting
12 Dec 2017

The ADS team was pleased to welcome our Users Group (ADSUG) to our home base here at the CfA for their second visit on 2-3 November. The ADSUG meets roughly once per year to hear about the status of ongoing...

ADS Indexes Its 100,000,000th Citation
05 Oct 2017

108 Citations and Counting! The ADS has reached its 100,000,000th citation! We hit this milestone the last week of September during our daily paper ingest. The 108 citation occurred during a batch ingest of papers that generated over a million...

ADS Classic Downtime
12 Apr 2017

ADS Unavalable on April 13, 2017 The main ADS site at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), http://adsabs.harvard.edu, will be shutdown on April 13 at 4pm EDT and will remain unavailable till approximately 11pm due to scheduled maintenance of the...

Become an ADS Power User!
26 Jan 2017

A recording of a tutorial given at the Center for Astrophysics on using the new ADS interface is now available. Hope you enjoy it! Recording of the tutorial (1h 8m) Slides of the presentation Topics covered in this tutorial include:...

The ADS Guide to the 229th AAS Meeting
30 Dec 2016

The ADS Guide to the 229th AAS Meeting The ADS team will be staffing booth 711 in the Exhibit area of the Gaylor Convention Center in Grapevine, TX for the duration of the AAS meeting (Jan 3-6, 2017). Stop by...

We're hiring!
19 Sep 2016

Update (April 25, 2017) All positions are now closed. Thanks to those who applied! Update (Jan 1, 2017) The positions have been reopened, and we will be accepting applications through the end of March, although hiring decisions may be taken...

ADS 2.0 end of life
04 Jul 2016

Happy Independence Day! For those of you that didn’t know, today is also the day that we are decommissioning the ADS 2.0 interface. It will no longer be accessible via its old URL and we encourage people to move to...

Super Charge your ADS Searches with Filters
13 Jun 2016

The majority of queries in ADS are searches for authors. Author searches are simple when the author has a unique name, but what happens when the name is a common one? A search “Wu, J” might bring back a huge...

Open Access and NASA Astrophysics Data
16 Mar 2016

NASA Astrophysics is, and has always been, a leader in providing open access to scientific data. With small exceptions, all data from NASA missions are publically available. Indeed NASA has also been the leader in creating systems to make the...

Claiming Papers And Finding People with ORCID
10 Mar 2016

If you have published a paper recently, you have probably come across the acronym ORCID at some point during the article submission process. Or you may have seen references to ORCID in your organization’s scientific staff database, AAS membership profile,...

Wrecipe for Simple ADS Apps
17 Feb 2016

Underneath the new user interface of the ADS, ADS Beta (or Bumblebee), there is the rebuilt infrastructure of the ADS platform that serves the application layer of the ADS. At the start of last year, we made these services accessible...

Discovering "Long-Fuse" Papers – Physics Results
20 Nov 2015

I ended the previous blog with a list of “long-fuse” astronomy papers and I realized that, since I have similar results for physics papers too, why not show them here as well? So, that’s what this blog will be about....

Discovering "Long-Fuse" Papers - A First Exploration
17 Nov 2015

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ADS Bumblebee libraries release
03 Nov 2015

We are happy to announce the first release of the ADS libraries in Bumblebee, and are pleased to see that some people have already started using it. The ADS libraries allow you to maintain a collection of bibcodes within your...

Calculating and Visualizing Publication and Citation Metrics with ADS Bumblebee
21 Oct 2015

For many scientists, it’s all about the numbers and when it comes to evaluating each other, it’s no different. Project managers and administrators also want to be able to evaluate the impact of programs or instruments. As a result, publication...

Updates on ADS Interfaces and the Announcement of Bumblebee
15 Jul 2015

The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a tool for finding astronomy and planetary science publications. ADS currently has three different interfaces: ADS “Classic” – the one you all know and love, We’re slowly removing Classic servers from use and the...