The Astrophysics Data System Logo astrophysics data system

What’s New

This page is updated monthly with a list of new ([new]) and improved ([improved]) features and bug fixes ([fixed]) to our website, API, data pipelines, and data holdings. We also list operations issues and improvements of note ([ops]).

To receive this listing via monthly email newsletter, along with announcements and new blog posts, sign up here.

December 2024

  • Announcements:

    • ADS/SciX at Upcoming Conferences
      The ADS/SciX team is gearing up for an exciting season of outreach and engagement at some of the most prominent Earth and space science conferences. We look forward to connecting with researchers, educators, and stakeholders to showcase how our digital library portal supports open science and accelerates discoveries.



      These events will feature live demos, new resources for researchers, and opportunities to engage with our tools. Don’t miss the chance to see how ADS/SciX can support your scientific endeavors. For more details, visit the respective event links or stop by our booth at AGU. We can’t wait to see you there!

    • Dr. Stephanie Jarmak Elected as AGU Informatics Secretary
      We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Stephanie Jarmak, SciX’s Planetary Science Project Scientist, has been elected as the Informatics Secretary for the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Informatics Section. Dr. Jarmak will begin her two-year term on 1 January 2025. As Informatics Secretary, Dr. Jarmak will play a vital role in supporting the section’s mission to transform data systems into knowledge systems, enhancing the capabilities of Earth and space science research. The AGU Informatics Section focuses on critical topics like data management and analysis, large-scale computational experimentation, and the hardware and software infrastructure essential to advancing Earth and space science. View the full election announcement here.

  • Development and data holdings updates as of December 1st:

    • Website and API
      • [new] About pages: created and updated the December 2024 ADSUG Program
      • [improved] About pages: Updated ADSUG members and added headshots for ADS Users Group
      • [improved] About pages: added 2023 ADSUG presentations
      • [improved] Help pages: Updated positional field search documentation to include description of last author/negative position searches with examples
      • [improved] Journals Database: added support to store a canonical abbreviation for each journal
      • [improved] Vault: fixed logs and removed bibcode sort
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 401k new records, and 10.9M new citations
Development details

November 2024

  • Announcements:
    • SciX Activities at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2024 Fall Meeting
      The Science Explorer (SciX) and Astrophysics Data System (ADS) team will be participating in the AGU Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C., from December 8–13. This event is a great opportunity for researchers to explore tools and resources for open-access Earth and space science. We invite you to join our co-hosted workshop on Sunday, December 8, titled “Harnessing the Power of NASA Open Digital Repositories for Earth and Space Research,” which will be co-hosted with the Planetary Data System (PDS) and the NASA Science Discovery Engine. This hands-on session will provide an in-depth look at how SciX and ADS support data discovery and integration. You can also connect with our teams at Booth #850 in the Exhibit Hall. Our team will be available to discuss SciX, ADS, and how these platforms can assist in advancing Earth and space science research.

      SciX Schedule Highlights at AGU:
    • ADS/SciX Shares AI and ML Innovations with NASA’s Digital Transformation Team
      Dr. Kelly Lockhart, the Technical Lead for the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) and Science Explorer (SciX), recently presented the ADS/SciX project to NASA’s Digital Transformation Team. This agency-level initiative was created by NASA to improve competitiveness in a digital-first workplace, enhance resource efficiency, and address increasing digital security concerns. In the presentation, Dr. Lockhart highlighted how the ADS/SciX project is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance research accessibility and streamline the discovery process across scientific disciplines. These efforts align with NASA’s strategic goals for digital transformation by supporting efficient data management and expanding research potential.

    • New Publication: INDUS – A Language Model for Scientific Research Applications
      Members of the ADS/SciX Team recently co-authored a pre-print publication titled “INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications.” This paper introduces INDUS, a specialized language model designed to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of scientific text analysis. Developed to handle complex language and large datasets, INDUS aims to streamline research processes across various scientific fields. To read the abstract or download the full text pre-print, visit SciX here. For a concise overview of the paper’s main points, a video summary is also available on the Paper with Video YouTube channel, which covers INDUS’s core concepts and intended applications in a straightforward format. There’s also an active discussion on Discord, where researchers and viewers can ask questions, share perspectives, and provide feedback on both the paper and the video summary.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of November 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] About pages: Added Paul Di Re to Team page
      • [new] About pages: Added Anna Kelbert to Team page
      • [fixed] Build issue with setup-ruby
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 378k new records, and 5.5M new citations
Development details
  • No changes

October 2024

  • Announcements:
    • Help Us Improve ADS: Complete Our User Survey by 1 November
      Are you a user of the Astrophysics Data System (ADS)? We invite you to share your valuable feedback by completing a user survey. Your insights will help us refine the platform to better meet your research and open science needs. The survey will take approximately 10 minutes to complete. As a token of our appreciation, those who submit responses by 1 November 2024 will have the chance to enter a drawing for a SciX T-Shirt. Complete the survey here.

    • SciX Team Engagement Highlights
      The SciX team has been active in various community engagement events. Dr. Stephanie Jarmak recently gave a colloquium talk at the Center for Astrophysics on “Observing Asteroids with JWST,” sharing insights into her planetary science research. You can watch the full presentation here. Dr. Alberto Accomazzi and Dr. Kelly Lockhart participated in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Space Science Workshop, held at the European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) in Madrid. Their talk on “AI and NLP in ADS” is available here. The event explored the growing role of NLP and large language models in space sciences, followed by hands-on hack days. Dr. Mugdha Polimera also attended the NLP workshop and contributed to a hack project that resulted in a chat bot that can answer questions about published astronomy softwares and packages (check out the app here). Additionally, Dr. Jennifer Lynn Bartlett presented a SciX colloquium at New Mexico Tech. Her slides are accessible here.

      Lastly, the SciX team is gearing up for the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Boise, ID (6-10 October). If you’re attending, visit the SciX booth to connect with the team!

    • Registration Now Open for the SciX Workshop the AGU Fall Meeting
      If you’re attending the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington, DC, don’t forget to sign up for the pre-meeting workshop co-hosted by Science Explorer (SciX), the Planetary Data System, and NASA Science Discovery Engine. The workshop will take place on Sunday, December 8, 2024, from 08:30 AM to 12:00 PM in Room Independence F-H at the Marriott Marquis hotel. The ticketed event title is (PREWS4). To participate, please add this workshop as a ticketed event when registering for the AGU meeting. You can find more details about the workshop here. The last day to register for AGU at the Early Bird rate is November 6, 2024. Be sure to secure your spot!
  • Development and data holdings updates as of October 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Updated the search syntax help page list of bibgroups
      • [fixed] Export: fixed output issues with formatting errors - bug in custom csv output, IEEE and Icarus eid, and JATsXML pub-date
      • [fixed] ORCID: set putcodes back to ints to fix bug with deleting claims
      • [ops] Export: Updated cls formats to output volume and page for doctype abstract ofaastex, aspc, mnras, and soph formats.
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 406k new records, and 6.88M new citations
Development details

September 2024

  • Announcements:
    • We’ve reached 8 million records in the SciX Earth Science collection! Explore recent papers here.

    • Workshop Convenes SciX Ambassadors at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
      The inaugural Science Explorer (SciX) Ambassador workshop took place 20-23 August at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. This milestone event brought together the first group of SciX Ambassadors—scientific experts and outreach professionals from around the world—marking their first meeting as a unified team. The workshop focused on advancing SciX’s mission of fostering open science and accelerating discovery in NASA Science Mission Directorate areas, including Astrophysics, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, Earth Science, and Physical & Biological Sciences.

      Over the four-day event, the new SciX Ambassadors collaborated on strategies to enhance access to scientific resources and promote interdisciplinary collaboration through SciX’s digital library platform. The workshop was designed to empower these pioneering Ambassadors to assume leadership roles in their communities, advocating for open access to scientific literature, data, and tools. Participants meet with the SciX development team to learn more about the platform and craft personalized work plans to guide their future activities within the Ambassador program.

      Learn more about the SciX Ambassadors here.

    • SciX Training Workshop at AGU Fall Meeting
      The Science Explorer (SciX) is pleased to announce an in-person workshop, “Harnessing the Power of NASA Open Digital Repositories for Earth and Space Research,” scheduled for Sunday, December 8 in Washington, DC. This event is part of the pre-conference workshop program for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. The 3-hour session will equip researchers with essential skills to utilize NASA’s digital resources, enhancing their ability to access and integrate Earth and space data effectively.

      Aligned with the AGU conference theme, “What’s Next for Science,” the workshop will delve into open digital repositories for NASA’s research, including SciX, the Planetary Data System, and the NASA Science Discovery Engine. Participants will engage in hands-on demonstrations and guided exercises, learning to navigate these platforms for comprehensive data discovery and integration. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, the workshop aims to bridge gaps between scientific disciplines and geographic boundaries, promoting innovative research and fostering a culture of openness and transparency.

      Please save the date and plan to register for the workshop when you sign up for the AGU Fall Meeting later this fall!

    • Careers at ADS/SciX - We are now hiring for the following two positions on the ADS/SciX team: 

      Digital Technologies Development Librarian: The ADS/SciX team is seeking a Digital Technologies Development Librarian who will support the team by designing and implementing new tools, technology and services, and will be involved in collection management, assisting with content decisions, documentation and user support.
      Applications are due by September 27. Apply here.

      IT Specialist (Back Office Developer): The ADS/SciX team is seeking an IT Specialist (Back Office Developer). The position requires experience with search engines (e.g., Solr, Elasticsearch), designing and building software (Java and Python), data pipelines, and REST APIs.

      Key responsibilities include maintaining and enhancing the ADS search engine (Java), managing its public API (Python), improving text processing pipelines (Python), and developing new functionality for metadata enhancement, citation analysis, and recommendations. The role will utilize ADS’s natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning technologies.
      Applications are due by September 30. Apply here.

    • ADS/SciX Staff to Attend NLP Workshop in Space Sciences
      Staff members from the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) and Science Explorer (SciX) will be participating in the upcoming workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the Space Sciences. This workshop will focus on applying NLP techniques to improve data analysis and knowledge discovery in space science research. Our participation reflects our ongoing efforts to stay informed about and contribute to advancements in technology relevant to our digital resources. Learn more about the workshop here.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of September 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Help pages: Descriptions of bibgroups
      • [ops] Citation helper and Object service: Image rebuild and dependency updates
      • [ops] Help pages: Switched to using Bundler for module install/management
      • [ops] Help pages: Added a few plugins to improve SEO, including a plugin to generate sitemaps
      • [ops] Help pages: Changed from GitHub pages deployment to using GitHub actions so that restricted plugins can be used
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 222K new records, and 12.6M new citations
Development details
  • Citation Helper Service Releases
  • Object Service Releases

August 2024

  • Announcements:

    • Job Opening: IT Specialist (Back Office Developer) on the ADS/SciX Team
      The ADS/SciX team is seeking an IT Specialist (Back Office Developer). The position requires experience with search engines (e.g., Solr, Elasticsearch), designing and building software (Java and Python), data pipelines, and REST APIs.

      Key responsibilities include maintaining and enhancing the ADS search engine (Java), managing its public API (Python), improving text processing pipelines (Python), and developing new functionality for metadata enhancement, citation analysis, and recommendations. The role will utilize ADS’s natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning technologies. Applications are due by September 30. Apply here.

    • Final Blog Post in SciX Data Linking and Indexing Series by Edwin Henneken
      The final installment in Edwin Henneken’s three-part blog series for SciX is now available. This concluding post offers an insightful exploration into the advanced processes of data linking and indexing within the Science Explorer. We invite you to check out the entire 3-part series below.
      Part I: Data Holdings
      This post explains how SciX integrates literature with research data, software, and services. It describes how data is represented within SciX, using a graph of digital objects and their relationships to illustrate the system’s structure. This sets the foundation for understanding the data linking mechanisms that support the FAIR principles in physical sciences.
      Part II: Linked Data
      The second post discusses linked data within the Research Life Cycle framework. It highlights the importance of linking digital artifacts like data and software to scholarly articles. The post also covers the process of capturing and indexing citations to these research products and provides strategies for finding linked data within SciX.
      Part III: Cited Data
      This final part explains how SciX manages cited data products. There is no fundamental difference between articles citing other articles, and articles citing data. Citations are just one small subset of the entire graph of linkages between research assets.

    • Video Spotlight
      On 17 July, Dr. Alberto Accomazzi, Principal Investigator of the Astrophysics Data System and the Science Explorer, presented a lecture at the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP). His talk, “The NASA Astrophysics Data System: A Case Study in the Integration of AI and Digital Libraries,” explored the evolution and future of the ADS, focusing on the integration of AI techniques. The lecture is now available for viewing here on the CLSP YouTube channel.

  • Development and data holdings updates as of August 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [ops] Updated paths and footer for Resolver Gateway Service
      • [ops] Vis updates: Migrated from Python 2 to Python 3, resulting bug fixes to the round() function, and modified paper and author networks
      • [ops] Bumblebee updates: Updated footer logos, feedback forms, and modified item-view event, making separate events for each collection found with the category field being updated
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 341.3K new records, and 1.89M new citations
Development details

July 2024

  • Announcements:

    • New Blog Series: SciX Data Linking and Indexing: We are pleased to share the first two installments in a new blog series by Edwin Henneken, SciX’s Content, Curation & Collaborations Lead. These posts provide an informative look into the processes of data linking and indexing within Science Explorer (SciX).
      • Part I: Data Holdings
        This post explains how SciX integrates literature with research data, software, and services. It describes how data is represented within SciX, using a graph of digital objects and their relationships to illustrate the system’s structure. This sets the foundation for understanding the data linking mechanisms that support the FAIR principles in physical sciences.
      • Part II: Linked Data
        The second post discusses linked data within the Research Life Cycle framework. It highlights the importance of linking digital artifacts like data and software to scholarly articles. The post also covers the process of capturing and indexing citations to these research products and provides strategies for finding linked data within SciX.
    • Upcoming Conferences and Events: Please be on the lookout for members of the SciX team as well as our new cohort of SciX Ambassadors at the following events in July! 

  • Development and data holdings updates as of July 1st:

    • Website and API
      • [new] Data Linking and Indexing blog series
      • [fixed] Several broken links on various help pages
      • [ops] Journals database maintenance updates for exporting data (ISSN identifiers, refereed conference proceedings pubtype), deleting bibstems, and some bug fixes
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 86k new records, 3.06M new citations
Development details

June 2024

  • Announcements:

    • We are pleased to announce that our Earth Science collection now contains over 7.5 million records. We have finished ingesting back content for Elsevier journals and are preparing to load content from Springer, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and other relevant publishers.

    • New Blog: Historic Observatory Publications in the Science Explorer - Discover the rich legacy of historic scientific publications now available through the Science Explorer (SciX). Foundational archives, including work from renowned observatories, have been meticulously digitized and are accessible to all. Dive into our full blog post here to learn more about these invaluable records and how you might also contribute to preserving the history of science.

    • Upcoming Conferences & Events Featuring SciX & ADS - In June, the SciX team is looking forward to connecting with our user community at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) 244th Meeting (9-13 June, Madison, WI) and the American Libraries Association 2024 Annual Conference (27 June-2 July, San Diego, CA) where our staff will be based at the NASA Booth #1939. If you are attending the #AAS224 Meeting, don’t forget to visit us at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Data System Booth in the exhibit hall or to join us for the following poster presentations and special session:

      • Historic Observatory Publications in the Astrophysics Data System
        Authors: Jennifer Bartlett, Donna Thompson, the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Team
        iPoster Session: 107.02 History iPoster, Terminal #27
        Date & Time: Monday, 10 June from 9-10am CT
        Location: Monona Terrace Convention Center Exhibit Hall A

        This iPoster highlights the efforts of Science Explorer (SciX) in digitizing and preserving historic observatory publications. It emphasizes the importance of these documents, which contain foundational astronomical research and unique observational data, and outlines the process and criteria for including new materials in the archive. The poster also discusses the expansion of ADS to include planetary science, heliophysics, and earth science, while maintaining its commitment to the astronomy and astrophysics communities.

      • Historic Observatories: Don’t Forget the Data!
        Authors: James Lattis, University of Wisconsin, Madison; R. Elizabeth Griffin, Herzberg Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Centre; Wayne Osborn, Central Michigan University; Jennifer Bartlett, NASA/SAO ADS (SciX)
        iPoster Session: 107.02 History iPoster, Terminal #26
        Date & Time: Monday, 10 June from 9-10am CT
        Location: Monona Terrace Convention Center Exhibit Hall A

        This poster emphasizes the critical importance of preserving the observational data produced by historic observatories, particularly photographic plates, which contain invaluable records of astronomical objects and events from the past. Despite technological advancements rendering some observatories’ practices outdated, these plates provide unique information that modern detectors cannot capture, crucial for understanding long-term changes in astrophysics. The poster calls for urgent efforts to preserve these delicate and bulky historical data alongside their metadata to prevent their loss.

      • Historic Observatories: Current Activities and Potential for Education, Public Outreach, and Research (Special Session)
        Date & Time: Wednesday, 12 June, 2-3:30pm CT
        Location: Monona Terrace Convention Center Meeting Rooms KL
        Session Presentations and Full Abstract

        The presentations in this session will explore the evolving roles of historic observatories in the modern astronomical community and discuss how these older research observatories, while largely outdated in terms of scientific capacities, still hold significance in today’s context. Talks from specific active historic observatories will highlight their missions, education programs, public outreach initiatives, and ongoing research, fostering discussions about their uncertain futures and enduring relevance.

  • Development and data holdings updates as of June 1st:
Development details

May 2024

  • Announcements:

    • We are extremely pleased to introduce our very first cohort of SciX Ambassadors! These exceptional individuals, representing diverse research disciplines, will play an important role in expanding the reach and impact of SciX by serving as liaisons between the platform and their communities. Through their work, they will enhance the interdisciplinary spirit of SciX and work with us to advance the cause of open science. Learn more about each of the new SciX Ambassadors here.

    • SciX team members will attend the 2024 Astrobiology Science Conference (#AbSciCon24) from May 5-10 in Providence, RI. If you’ll be there, we invite you to stop by our booth in the exhibit hall to meet our Astrophysics Project Scientist, Dr. Jennifer Lynn Bartlett, and Data Curation Librarian, Donna Thompson. We’ll be at booth #5, providing demonstrations of the latest features of the SciX platform. The exhibit hall is open Monday through Wednesday from 9:30–11:30 am and 1–6 pm and we hope you’ll stop by to say hello and explore SciX’s newest capabilities.

    • At the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation happening later this month (20-25 May), you will also find SciX Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Specialist, Dr. Felix Grezes, and former ADS visiting PhD student, Atilla Kaan Alkan, presenting their paper “Enriching a Time-Domain Astrophysics Corpus with Named Entity Conference and Astrophysical Relationship Annotations”. If you can’t attend the talk or just want to know more about their work, we invite you to explore other publications by Felix and Attila that we’ve pulled together in this open SciX library collection.

  • Development and data holdings updates as of May 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Help pages: Added publisher (pb) to list of custom export formats
      • [new] Added our ADASS software award to list of awards
      • [ops] Export service:
        • Modified conference location field to be recognized more inclusively
        • Updated XML schemas; Moved publisher between origin and copyright, removed url for valid xml, and fixed xml reference to point to correct schema location
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 95k new records, 1.04M new citations
Development details

April 2024

  • Announcements:

    • ADS Users Group Report
      We are pleased to announce the publication of the report from the ADS Users Group (ADSUG) meeting held on November 16-17, 2023. The ADSUG serves as an advisory body to the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), offering insights and recommendations to enhance its services and operations.

      The report explores the ADS’s role in astronomy research, its potential for AI advancements, and acknowledges the ADS team’s commitment to excellence during the transition to SciX, backed by positive user survey feedback. Key insights include the need for clearer prioritization of work and adapting the ADSUG to reflect diverse user communities. Recommendations for the new user interface and practical suggestions from community feedback are also highlighted.

      The full report provides valuable insights and recommendations for enhancing the ADS’s services and operations, ensuring its continued support for the astronomy research community. Access the complete ADSUG report here.

      We extend our gratitude to the ADS Users Group for their dedication and contributions to improving the ADS platform.

    • SciX Ambassador Program - Last Day to Apply April 4th!
      Applications for the SciX Ambassador Program close on April 4th! Don’t miss this opportunity to represent the SciX user community and engage with researchers across various disciplines within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

      Ambassadors will play a crucial role in fostering connections, expanding access to the SciX digital library, and driving discussions to advance open science. In return, they’ll receive community outreach training, visibility, recognition, and financial support for in-person trainings and conferences.

      Apply now and become a leader in the SciX community! Learn more and submit your application here.

    • SciX Conference Participation
      The SciX team delivered three presentations at the recent Year of Open Science (YOS) Culminating Conference

      If you registered for the online event, you can access session recordings through April 21st.

      Also, don’t forget to save the date for SciX’s booth at the upcoming AbSciCon conference from May 5-10 in Providence, RI. If you’re planning to attend, we’d love to connect with you.

  • Development and data holdings updates as of April 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Blog: SciX Ambassadors
      • [improved] Updated help page for the score sort method
      • [fixed] Fixed myADS bug where data gets lost when notification is deactivated
      • [ops] Maintenance on the Bearer Token for ORCID
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 334k new records, 2.58M new citations
Development details

March 2024

  • Announcements:

    • Applications Now Being Accepted for the SciX Ambassador Program - Ambassadors will serve as SciX user community representatives, actively engaging with the scientific community across various disciplines within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. They will work with the SciX team to foster connections among researchers in fields such as Astrophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, and Biological & Physical Sciences. As communicators, ambassadors will convey information about the SciX digital library resource, expanding SciX access and impact for new audiences. Their leadership will drive discussions, organize events, and provide mentorship to fellow researchers, contributing to the advancement of open science. In recognition of their contributions, ambassadors will receive community outreach training, visibility and recognition for their contributions as a SciX community leader, and financial support to attend in-person trainings at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other conferences where they will present on SciX and their research. We invite you to learn more about the program and apply here by 4 April 2024.

    • SciX Team Presentations at the Year of Open Science Online Conference - Please join members of the SciX team at the upcoming Year of Open Science (YOS) Culminating Conference taking place online March 21 and 22, 2024. Hosted by the Center for Open Science in collaboration with NASA, this free event will showcase outcomes, coalition-building efforts, and ongoing work stemming from the 2023 Year of Open Science (YOS). Learn more and register here.

    • New Blog Post! Highlights the Role of User Feedback in the ADS to SciX Expansion - The crucial role of user feedback in shaping the evolution of both ADS and the Science Explorer (SciX) is the focus of a new blog post. Explore how your input is driving enhancements to search functionality and ensuring a positive transition from ADS to the expanded SciX platform here.

    • Assessing your Observatory’s Impact: Best Practices in Establishing and Maintaining Observatory Bibliographies - A new publication from the Observatory Bibliographers Collaboration features the use of the Astrophysics Data System as a best practice in establishing and maintaining bibliographies for observatories wishing to measure and evaluate the scientific output and overall impact of their facilities. Read the open access article here.

  • Development and data holdings updates as of March 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Blog: Informed Transformation: User Feedback’s Role in the ADS to SciX Transition
      • [new] Biblib: added a parameter to indicate user permissions (access level) of libraries
      • [new] Bumblebee: added ‘Publisher’ field to abstract pages, with implementations on quick links and full text source links
      • [improved] Bumblebee: Default collections to search are now astronomy & physics; updated settings to customize default collection(s) to be searched, or search ‘all’ collections as the default
      • [improved] Help pages: updated Solr fields & operators documentation
      • [improved] Export: implemented support for new doctype of ‘dataset’, and updated BibTeX pubtype
      • [fixed] Bumblebee: fixed missing metrics bug
      • [fixed] ORCID: fixed bug where verified claims sometimes weren’t updating status from “pending” in local profile storage
      • [ops] Tugboat: maintenance to allow rebuilding of deployable image
      • [ops] Bumblebee maintenance updates to GA4, app settings styling, and API
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 285.8k new records, 3.9M new citations
Development details

February 2024

Development details

January 2024

  • Announcements:
    • The ADS/SciX team will be attending the 243rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society from 7-11 January 2024 in New Orleans, LA. We invite you to view a detailed schedule of planned ADS/SciX conference presentations here and encourage you to connect with us for a demonstration of the new Science Explorer (SciX) which was successfully beta launched on 11 December 2023 at SciXplorer.org. Staff will also be available at the Center for Astrophysics booth #315 & NASA booth #702 throughout the conference to answer questions about the ADS to SciX transition.
    • Applications are now being accepted through 31 January 2024 for a new Earth Science Project Scientist position who will work to establish and maintain the Science Explorer (SciX) as a world leading information resource for Earth Science. Duties of this job include serving as the principal SciX scientific resource for Earth Science, developing new methods to search, discover, and use research data and publications, and serving as a research scientist at the intersection of Earth and Information Science. The employee will devote 30% of their time to original research in Earth Science. To learn more or apply, please visit the USAJOBS recruitment here.
    • The Science Explorer was featured as an open science success story in the NASA Transform to Open Science (TOPS) blog last month. We invite you to read the story highlighting the SciX launch here.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of January 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Notes feature: Users can add notes to documents in their libraries
      • [new] Timestamp sort: Users can sort documents within a library by date the document was added to the library
      • [improved] Updated help pages to include xe (e-print comments) in the list of fields available for custom export
      • [fixed] Biblib: Users were erroneously able to copy their own library into a library they did not have permissions to edit
      • [fixed] Export: author separator issue for custom format, and misc publisher issue for bibtex format
      • [ops] Solr schema now supports the has field which stores the names of fields that exist for a given record.
      • [ops] Updated and refactored SciX about/blog/help pages
      • [ops] Updated careers page: Project Scientist for Earth Science position
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 339.6K new records, and 5.79M new citations
Development details

December 2023

  • Announcements:
    • The repository has reached a new peak of 20 million records! A significant increase in Earth Science content has been included over the past month in expanding bibliographic content with the launch of SciX.
    • We’re pleased to announce the unveiling of the Science Explorer (SciX) at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (11-15 December) in San Francisco. Join us at booth #649 or the NASA Booth #531 (Demo Kiosk #2) in the Exhibit Hall for an exclusive introduction to the SciX platform. Our team’s AGU schedule is packed with engaging presentations, including: demos, AGU poster and oral presentations, and an intro to SciX at the NASA Hyperwall. For a detailed list of planned activities, visit our blog here. See you soon at AGU!
    • The ADS Users Group met last month to learn about what we are working on now and our plans for the next year of growth as SciX. Curious? Visit the Users Group page to view our presentations.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of December 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] About pages: Added Stephanie Jarmak, Project Scientist for Planetary Science, to the team page
      • [new] Journals database: When a user makes a query to the /issn endpoint, the return body will now include the abbreviated publisher name.
      • [new] The data schema now includes the has field: a pre-computed field that indicates whether a subset of Solr fields are populated for a given entry.
      • [improved] Updated source links label arxiv to preprint for be more general/appropriate for other preprint sources
      • [fixed] Disabled acronym expansion for _nosyn fields to prevent incorrect exact queries when searching with “=”
      • [ops] Upgraded the Bumblebee web application to Node 16 and updated to Recaptcha v3
      • [ops] Resolver service and gateway maintenance: Now accepts link sub type as is, rather than converting it to upper case
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 1.69M new records, and 9.78M new citations
Development details

November 2023

  • Announcements:
    • Please tell us what you think! We value your perspective! Is something bothering you? Is there something you would like to see? Like something? Please complete our brief survey by 14 November to help enhance the ADS user experience and guide innovation.
    • We have a new blog post, SciX Models and Datasets, that discusses the machine learning models and datasets created by the ADS team to support our platform and curation.
    • If you are attending the 2023 Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems XXXIII conference, please join us for the ADASS Prize for an Outstanding Contribution to Astronomical Software award and talk on 9 November, from 9:30-10:00 am when Alberto Accommazzi will be accepting the award on behalf of the ADS Team.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of November 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Published new blog post about SciX Models and Datasets
      • [fixed] ORCID: Changed bibcode in the ORCID module to keep string type consistent
      • [ops] Migration to Gradle: Changed the build system to Gradle instead of Ant, greatly reducing build times
      • [ops] Updated Ruby/Jekyll install instructions for developers maintaining the ADS Help and Blog pages
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 315.5k new records, and 2.25M new citations
Development details

October 2023

  • Development and data holdings updates as of October 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [fixed] Reference Service when checking the link for an unknown data type
      • [ops] Oracle maintenance on the new /cleanup endpoint
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 193.3k new bibcodes, 1.74M new citations
Development details

September 2023

  • Announcements:
    • We are very excited to announce that during the summer, four new employees joined the ADS team:
      • Jennifer Bartlett, ADS Project Scientist for Astrophysics
      • Fernanda de Macedo Alves, Back-End Developer
      • Jean-Claude Paquin, Back-End Developer (Search)
      • Mugdha Polimera, in the role of Back-End Developer
    • The 2023 ADASS Prize for an Outstanding Contribution to Astronomical Software was awarded to Alberto Accomazzi and the ADS team
  • Development and data holdings updates as of September 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Added our Database Update Policy to the Help pages, which describes our holdings update schedule
      • [improved] Bumblebee: Updated search examples on main page
      • [improved] Export: Added two new author formats for custom export
      • [improved] Help pages: Updated info about custom formats for exporting authors
      • [improved] Help pages: Added JATS XML to list of export formats
      • [ops] About pages: Added two new Back End Development team members to the Team page - Fernanda de Macedo Alves and Jean-Claude Paquin
      • [ops] Bumblebee: Added JATS XML export format
      • [ops] Bumblebee: Updated publisher ordering for link generator
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 97k new bibcodes, 1.84M new citations
Development details

August 2023

  • Development and data holdings updates as of August 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Export: Made adjustments to JATS XML
      • [improved] Resolver: Removed constraint that requires data link sub types
      • [ops] About pages: Added Daniel Chivvis, Digital Technologies Development Librarian, to the Team page
      • [ops] Bumblebee: Moved src/libs into source control; added fix for resource ordering
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 83k new bibcodes, 1.22M new citations
Development details

July 2023

  • Announcements:
    • The position for Project Scientist for Earth Science at ADS is still open! The scientist will work to develop the Science Explorer platform and devote 30% of their time to do original research in Earth Science. Find out more and apply here.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of July 7th:
    • Website and API
      • [new] ADS Libraries: Added raw output option that allows the user to return the exact list of bibcodes that are saved in the library via the API
      • [new] Export: JATS export feature added and updated
      • [new] Resolver: Added EMAC to data sources
      • [improved] Export: Added two new specifiers, for number of references and for eprint comments, for custom formats
      • [fixed] Resolver: bug fixed for when parameters are included in the query
      • [ops] About pages: Updated job title for Dr. Kelly Lockhart, and moved Dr. Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma from active employees to research associates
      • [ops] Oracle: doc matching bug fixed and tests added
      • [ops] Bumblebee: Added Google Analytics 4 script
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 59.3k new bibcodes, 2.59M new citations
Development details

June 2023

  • Announcements:
    • ADS is hiring a Project Scientist for Earth Science, who will work to establish and maintain the ADS as a world leading information resource for Earth Science and related disciplines. The employee will devote 30% of their time to do original research in Earth science. Find out more and apply here.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of June 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [fixed] Fixed a bug in the bibcode section of the feedback form
      • [fixed] Fixed date parsing issue
      • [fixed] Journals Database: API fix for 500 errors on the /holdings endpoint
      • [ops] Maintenance to Reference Resolver
      • [ops] About pages: Removed PS scientist job listing
      • [ops] Added endpoint to enable/disable all myADS for a user
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 68k new bibcodes, 739k new citations
Development details

May 2023

  • Announcements:
  • Development and data holdings updates as of May 1st:
    • Website and API
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 180k new bibcodes, 1.59M new citations
Development details

April 2023

  • Announcements:
  • Development and data holdings updates as of April 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] About pages: Added link to 2022 ADSUG report
      • [new] Help pages: Added page with #ADSHelp tweets, which contain quick tips and screenshots or short GIFs
      • [new] Libraries: Added new endpoint /biblib/query that allows items to be added to a library by supplying /search query parameters
      • [new] Journals: Adds the ability to search the journals database on a user-supplied ISSN to return the ADS bibstem and Journal name if available.
      • [improved] Libraries: Added versioning to libraries for ease of restoration in the event a user wishes to revert library versions; updated adding documents to library function to validate existence of bibcodes
      • [ops] Libraries: efficiency improvements to fetching list of libraries
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 460k new bibcodes, 3.7M new citations
      • ADS has begun the process of ingesting our new Earth Science holdings. More information and instructions on accessing these holdings will be available soon.
Development details

March 2023

  • Announcements:
    • ADS is hiring a Project Scientist for Planetary Science, who will work to establish and maintain the ADS as a world leading information resource for planetary science and related disciplines. The employee will devote 30% of their time to do original research in planetary science. Find out more and apply here.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of March 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] About page: Planetary science project scientist job ad posted
      • [fixed] Website: feedback form fixes
      • [fixed] Recommender: fixes in support of doc matching pipeline
      • [fixed] Blog: fixed formatting of main blog post listing so thumbnail image doesn’t overlap with blog titles when at a medium screen width
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 47.3k new bibcodes, 757.6k new citations
Development details

February 2023

  • Announcements:
  • Development and data holdings updates as of February 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Recommender: Enable matching on DOI, if DOI is present in pubnote
      • [fixed] Export: fixed bug with custom export when author has no first name, better handle multiple DOIs
      • [ops] Journals: refactored code
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 61.4k new bibcodes, 1.13M new citations
Development details

January 2023

  • Announcements:
    • ADS will be participating at the 241st AAS meeting in Seattle with a booth (#326), three iPoster presentations (on document matching, software citation, and machine learning activities), exhibitor presentations (Tuesday, January 10th at 9:30am & Wednesday January 11th at 10:30am in the exhibit hall), and a Hyperwall talk at the NASA booth (Monday, January 9th at 9:35am). Please stop by to say hi!
    • We published a new blog post about our plans to integrate the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus in ADS Search and Discovery.
    • ADS is still hiring! We’re looking for candidates for four positions: an astrophysics project scientist (30% research time), a back-office developer experienced with Python (new!), a search + back-office developer knowledgeable in Java and Python, and a DevOps engineer to manage our software infrastructure. For more details and to apply, visit our Careers page.
    • The ADS database has reached 17 million records and nearly 160 million citations!
  • Development and data holdings updates as of January 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Blog: new blog post on the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus and its integration into ADS
      • [improved] Website: Fixed styling of search bar so text and the clear button do not overlap, updated author search examples, removed message referring to ADS Classic credentials
      • [ops] Search engine: fixed bad SSL certificate, updated schema
      • [ops] Blog: edited templates to better format multiple authors and their affiliations
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 62.3k new bibcodes, 1.2M new citations
Development details

December 2022

  • Announcements:
    • We held our annual ADS Users Group meeting virtually November 9th and 10th, where we updated our advisory committee on our progress this year and our plans for the future. The presentations from the meeting are now available and the committee’s report will be available soon.
    • We are still accepting applications for the position of Project Scientist for Astrophysics, and have openings for two developers. Find out more and apply here.
    • We hosted (virtually) the first Workshop on Information Extraction from the Scientific literature (WIESP). The full agenda, with links to the talks, can be viewed here.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of December 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] About pages: presentations from our November 2022 ADSUG meeting are now available, with the committee’s report to follow soon
      • [fixed] Author affiliation report: changed default if no month is provided from “00” to “01”; fixed logic to more reliably use the canonical affiliations, if available
      • [fixed] Oracle (docmatching): fixed a bug in matching by DOI, and to allow more than one pubnote
      • [ops] Help and about pages: updated team members’ titles, fixed broken links
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 208k new bibcodes, 2.05M new citations
Development details

November 2022

  • Announcements:
    • ADS has an opening for the Project Scientist for Astrophysics, who will work to establish and maintain the ADS as a world leading information resource for astrophysics and related disciplines. The employee will devote 30% of their time to do original research in astrophysics. The project also has two developer positions still open. Find out more and apply here.
    • The ADS team will be hosting the 2022 ADS Users Group meeting November 9 and 10. Do you have a request, suggestion, or general feedback about the ADS project? You’re welcome to submit it to the advisory panel by emailing us with “ADSUG” in the subject line.
    • ADS maintains a database of summary information about the publications we index—the Journals database (JournalsDB). It includes information that the ADS uses for internal content management, but that is also useful for librarians and other content managers to know about how specific titles are classified and what the ADS’ holdings are for individual titles and volumes. More information is available on our API documentation and in our example Jupyter notebook.
    • ADS pipelines have been updated to calculate metrics for software records ingested from Zenodo. Metrics for these records can be examined individually or in aggregate with any other records.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of November 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Journals service: initial release
      • [improved] Website: updated language on settings page and facets, adjusted sort order of autocomplete options
      • [fixed] Website: fixed bug with banner styling
      • [fixed] Metrics: fixed bug in citation histogram when max year is in the future
      • [fixed] Recommender: fixed scoring bugs
      • [ops] Help page: updated privacy policy
      • [ops] Recommender: updates to prep for arXiv DOIs
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 102k new bibcodes, 2.6M new citations
Development details

October 2022

  • Announcements:
    • The ADS curation team rolled out a new harvest and curation process for retrieving astronomy & astrophysics books from HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library); over 800 books were added this month.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of October 1st:
    • Website and API
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 53.8k new bibcodes, 383k new citations
      • Ingested 1600 new and/or updated monographs from Princeton University Press and Harvard Libraries and 1500 LPI Bulletin entries, which required a lot of manual curation and filled in gaps in our planetary science holdings
Development details

September 2022

  • Announcements:
    • The ADS team has been recently selected by NASA to extend its coverage and services into the fields of planetary science, heliophysics, earth sciences, and NASA funded research in the biological and physical sciences. This will create new opportunities for engagement between the ADS team and the other NASA Science Divisions, bringing together astronomers, planetary scientists, and earth scientists.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of September 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [fixed] Export: allow LaTeX fielded encoding for bibcodes; removed escaping underscore in DOI for BibTeX
      • [ops] Reduced number of retries when a query fails to avoid slowing server response
      • [ops] Recommender: algorithm and efficiency improvements
      • [ops] About page: updated team page, updated salary/benefits language on careers page
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 76.8k new bibcodes, 1.48M new citations
Development details

August 2022

  • Announcements:
    • ADS is still hiring! We’re looking candidates for two positions: a search + back-office developer knowledgeable in Java and Python, and a DevOps engineer to manage our software infrastructure, including search engines, relational databases, and cloud-based microservices. For more details and links to the applications, visit our Careers page.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of August 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Website: multiple DOIs on abstract pages now supported where available
      • [improved] Website: updated some tooltip language
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 71.6k new bibcodes, 1.3M new citations
Development details
  • Bumblebee (front-end/website) releases

July 2022

  • Announcements:
    • ADS is hiring! We’re looking for a DevOps engineer to manage our software infrastructure, including search engines, relational databases, and cloud-based microservices. We’ll also soon have an additional opening for a search+back-office developer. For more details and links to the applications, visit our Careers page.
    • ADS is co-organizing WIESP 2022, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) workshop, for AACL-IJCNLP 2022. If you’re interested in participating, check out our challenge/shared task (register here; final submission deadline: August 10th).
  • Development and data holdings updates as of July 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Export: Added ASCII field encoding as an option for custom export formats, updated help pages with instructions for this encoding
      • [improved] Metrics: Added support for indices for individual papers
      • [fixed] Website: fixed bug that caused parent nodes to be displayed in facets
      • [ops] Help pages: Added links to iPosters in last month’s announcements, fixed broken help page links
      • [ops] About pages: Updated team bios, updated ADSUG membership and pages
      • [ops] Reference service: optimizations
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 69.4k new bibcodes, 1.05M new citations
Development details

June 2022

Development details

May 2022

  • Development and data holdings updates as of May 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [ops] Updated Solr search engine configuration
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 70.7k new bibcodes, 1.36M new citations
Development details

April 2022

  • Announcements:
  • Development and data holdings updates as of April 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Libraries: Show number of records visible in library, with warning if different from number of records shown in library header
      • [improved] Export: adjusted which fields are used for some exports when there is more than one similar field available (pub_raw instead pub, aff_canonical instead of aff)
      • [improved] Search engine: reworked transliteration rules
      • [ops] About page: cleaned up Team page
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 51.3k new bibcodes; 1.02M new citations
Development details

March 2022

  • Announcements:
    • We’ve migrated the serving of PDF full-text documents to ADS’s cloud platform in order to provide greater reliability and accessibility to our article archive.
    • The AAS published a press release providing an update of the Asclepias project, in which ADS, Zenodo, and the AAS have collaborated to promote the preservation and citation of scientific software in the literature.
    • The ADS team published a paper on its experience with accessibility of its user interface.
    • We’ve started a Twitter campaign (#ADShelp) to provide better user support upon a recommendation from our users group.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of March 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Help documentation: advanced documentation on search syntax and author searching now available
      • [improved] Website: improved print layout; made the bibcode a copy button on the abstract page; added “inst” to the “all search terms” list; added book author field to abstract pages; added more authors to the search examples to improve sub-field diversity
      • [improved] Search engine: major update to author transliteration rules, standardizing the “ASCII-fication”
      • [fixed] Website: fixed bug with public libraries getting onto users’ My Libraries lists; fixed bug causing metrics graphs to not properly update when switching views; fixed author list semicolon issue; fixes to feedback forms
      • [fixed] Search engine: removed obsolete fields and made some facet indices case insensitive
      • [ops] Website: small fixes to favicon and build errors; improved resource timeouts
      • [ops] Search engine: testing custom implementations of topn()
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 54.3k new bibcodes; 992k new citations
Development details

February 2022

  • Announcements:
    • A recent presentation about ADS by PI Alberto Accomazzi is available online.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of February 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Help pages: Moved information on Author Affiliations report, used to assist with compiling a list of co-authors for NSF and other grant applications, from FAQ to its own help page
      • [improved] Export: Allow %X, the arXiv ID, in the custom citation key in BibTeX exports
      • [fixed] Export: added editor to Endnote and Refworks export formats; display page range, if available, for Endnote and Medlars export formats; fixed how book titles are exported in Endnote format; fixed bug with custom format page range %p-%P when end page isn’t available; for BibTex format, replaced @INBOOK with @INCOLLECTION
      • [ops] We had two brief outages, one due to a CDN outage and one due to a Kubernetes master node issue.
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 91.3k new bibcodes; 772k new citations
Development details

January 2022

  • Announcements:
    • The report from the ADS Users Group meeting in November 2021 is now available.
    • The ADS participated at the 2021 Fall AGU meeting with a poster presentation (also available as an ESSOAr preprint) about the expansion of FAIR content in its database.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of January 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] About page: added link to 2021 ADSUG report
      • [new] Help pages: added a help page for library set operations
      • [improved] Help pages: added information about library collaborators
      • [fixed] Search engine: Fixed scoring for second-order operators, fixed multiphrase token search expansion, fixed issue with citation retrieval failing randomly
      • [ops] Search engine: Updated schema to not copy/duplicate identifiers, security fixes
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 46k new bibcodes; 700k new citations
Development details

December 2021

  • Announcements:
    • We held our annual ADS Users Group meeting virtually November 15th and 16th, where we updated our advisory committee on our progress this year and our plans for the future. The presentations from the meeting are now available and the committee’s report will be available soon.
    • We’ve begun expanding our holdings in planetary science and heliophysics. For a behind-the-scenes look at what that means for our curation team, read our new blog post on using our API to complete a curation project in conjunction with the Space Sciences and Astrobiology Division at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC/SSAD).
    • Thanks to help from the AAS, we have incorporated more than 20,000 PhD theses from the AstroGen project, including many non-US theses. Although these do not have abstracts, many of them do have links to their fulltext sources. If you find your thesis is still missing, or that it is duplicated, or if you would like to add an abstract, please submit a correction through our feedback form.
    • The ADS database has reached 16 million records and over 143 million citations!
  • Development and data holdings updates as of December 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Blog: new blog post on using our API internally to help with curation
      • [new] Help pages: added conference handouts to our help pages
      • [new] About page: presentations from our November 2021 ADSUG meeting are now available, with the committee’s report to follow soon; added three new employees, Tom Allen, Taylor Jacovich, and Tom Fehring, to our Team page
      • [ops] Fixed potential security issue with fetching the password reset URL
      • [ops] Deployed several services (citation helper, metrics, object) under Python 3
      • [ops] Help pages: cleaned up some old Classic links
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 78.6k new bibcodes; 834k new citations
Development details

November 2021

  • Announcements:
    • We’ve given our homepage search examples a refresh: the selection of search examples has been updated based on user feedback, and the author names in the examples now reflect recent prize winners.
    • The ADS team will be hosting the 2021 ADS Users Group meeting November 15-16. Do you have a request, suggestion, or general feedback about the ADS project? You are welcome to submit it to the advisory panel by emailing us with “ADSUG” in the subject line.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of November 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: refreshed search examples and author examples on the Modern Form homepage; improved accessibility; added more data link types
      • [fixed] User accounts: fixed bug that caused email addresses associated with user accounts to be case sensitive
      • [fixed] Website: fixed several feedback form bugs
      • [ops] Help pages: updated language about API terms of use
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 54.8k new bibcodes; 1.34M new citations
Development details

October 2021

  • Announcements:
    • The 2021 ADS Users Group (ADSUG) Meeting will take place virtually on November 15-16. ADS users are welcome to submit feedback or questions to the panel by sending an email to adshelp@cfa.harvard.edu with “ADSUG” in the subject line. The meeting program and presentations will be posted on the ADSUG website.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of October 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: added dark mode to dropdown menus, added more information to 404 pages as applicable, added Dataverse data link type
      • [improved] Resolver: added more data link types
      • [improved] About page: updated the ADS Users Group page with the new members
      • [fixed] Website: Fixed bug with dropdown menus, fixed add-to-library bug when there are no existing libraries, fixed bug with feedback forms
      • [fixed] Classic translator: Fixed bug to recognize multi-part last names with no first initial given
      • [ops] Made the Solr service compatible with Python 3
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 172.9k new bibcodes; 1.56M new citations
      • Added data links to 5600 AGU articles
      • Added 480 software packages cited by 500+ AGU articles
Development details

September 2021

  • Announcements:
    • On August 16th, ADS welcomed Jenny Koch as our newest team member, in the position of digital technologies development librarian. Jenny has a Master of Library & Information Science from Simmons College and comes to us from the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program at NASA Langley. Welcome to the team, Jenny!
  • Development and data holdings updates as of September 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Export: Added new custom author format %k to allow all authors to be formatted as “Firstname M. Lastname”
      • [new] Help pages and blog: New blog post on OpenAPI help documentation; updated help documentation to include information on new custom export author format %k
      • [improved] Website: improved speed and clarity of the graphs in the right pane of the search results page; updated ORCID mode switch to use “ORCID green”
      • [fixed] Website: fixed bug with year graph on search results page; fixed description on “property” in all search terms menu
      • [fixed] Export: improved escaping in custom export formats
      • [fixed] Resolver: fixed bug with wrong in-house URL for associated links
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 44.4k new bibcodes; 1.09M new citations
Development details

August 2021

  • Announcements:
    • You can now easily download CSV data behind the histograms displayed with search results (“Years,” “Citations,” “Reads”) as well as visualizations (Citations Metrics, Author and Paper Networks, Concept Cloud and Results Graph)—click the download button on the histogram or visualization to download the CSV file.
    • Interested in trying our new API docs but unsure where to begin? Read our blog post for an overview and some usage examples to get you started.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of August 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Website: Added button on metrics and histograms to download data as a CSV
      • [improved] Website: Added descriptions to “All Search Terms” dropdown menu; updated API help page link on homepage
      • [fixed] Website: Fixed bugs on feedback form, with highlights, and on abstract page for papers with no authors; updated ORCID icons to use correct shade of green; updated a journal bibstem on Paper Form search
      • [fixed] Export: Fixed links for showing number of citations and references; added total number of citations to XML exports
      • [ops] Website: updated resource timeout to keep site from hanging while loading
      • [ops] Help docs: added OpenAPI documentation for internal endpoints
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 103.9k new bibcodes; 1.28M new citations
Development details

July 2021

  • Announcements:
    • ADS is pleased to announce our new name change policy. We recognize that users change their names for many reasons, and some users desire or require more privacy around their previous names. We will now update the searchable metadata and pages within ADS to reflect an author’s current name, as need requires, even if that differs from the publisher’s metadata for those papers.
    • Our user-facing API is now fully documented using the OpenAPI specification! Explore the API and make test API calls, all from the convenience of your browser.
    • Now available: dark mode! You can toggle the setting manually or let your system’s setting turn it on for you.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of July 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Website: Added dark mode option; added ORCID ID search links for authors on the abstract page
      • [new] Help pages: New ADS name change policy, new OpenAPI full API documentation
      • [improved] Website: HTML in abstracts is now rendered correctly; external links for associated works are now supported; totals are now shown on metrics histograms when mousing over
      • [improved] Export: added 5 new journal macros to AASTeX exports
      • [improved] Help pages: restructured main API help page; added journal macros and macros .sty pages (moved from Classic)
      • [fixed] Website: results page sidebar no longer disappears upon login; fixes for library page bugs; fixed bug in citations/references tabs on abstract screen when paper has no title
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 104.7k new bibcodes; 903.2k new citations
Development details

June 2021

  • Announcements:
    • Join our team! We have a new job posting for a back-office developer and/or data scientist, as well as two existing postings: one for a part-time astronomer to prep machine learning datasets and perform data analysis and one for a digital technologies and development librarian.
    • New content in ADS! We are improving our coverage of Planetary Science and Heliophysics to support research in those disciplines and facilitate interdisciplinary studies in Space Sciences. Look for a steady increase in the number of journals and conferences relevant to these two disciplines in the coming year.
    • Coming soon! A much requested UI feature: dark mode.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of June 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: reorganized settings page into search and export settings; improved functionality of Add to Library widget; improved hover-over functionality to make usable on touch screens; minor improvements for library display, mobile login and registration pages, mobile menus, mobile layouts
      • [improved] Export: added two new author formats, O and o
      • [fixed] Website fixes: applied institution facets no longer show as “affiliations,” fixed several small bugs with the fulltext sources dropdown icon on the search results page, fixed small styling bug for Explore menu options, removed My Homepage, fixed 404 error for older browsers
      • [fixed] Link resolver: fixed some small bugs after Python 3 upgrade
      • [ops] Graphics: simplified database schema
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 127k new bibcodes; 1.08M new citations
Development details

May 2021

  • Announcements:
    • We’re hiring! We have one position available for a part-time astronomer to prep machine learning datasets and perform data analysis and one for a digital technologies and development librarian. We’ll also soon have an additional opening for a back-office developer. For more details and links to the applications, visit our Careers page.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of May 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: styling improvements for mobile view, libraries, link gateway, and help pages/blog
      • [improved] Search: improved affiliations searching, including adding aff_id to the virtual inst search field
      • [fixed] Website: removed disallowed library functionality for users with permissions other than owner/admin
      • [fixed] Export: fixes for encoding when not using macros
      • [ops] Made several services (author affiliation, export, harbour, resolver gateway, resolver service, vault) compatible with Python 3
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 60.8k new bibcodes; 1.49M new citations
Development details

April 2021

  • Development and data holdings updates as of April 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: several usability improvements to the mobile version of the website
      • [fixed] ORCID: fix for error when claiming records with multiple bibcodes (e.g. MNRAS tmp vs. MNRAS final published version)
      • [ops] About page: added new staff members Jennifer Chen and Felix Grezes to Team page
      • [ops] Made several services (biblib, oracle, ORCID, tugboat) compatible with Python 3
      • [ops] Website: updated NASA Cooperative Agreement info in footer
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 46.9k new bibcodes; 593.8k new citations
      • New physics papers are now added weekly, instead of about every month
Development details

March 2021

  • Announcements:
    • On March 1st, the ADS project welcomed Shinyi (Jennifer) Chen and Felix Grezes as new team members. Jennifer has a Masters degree in Computer Science from USC with a Diploma in User Experience Design, bringing to the team expertise in UI/UX. Felix is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and brings to the team an expertise in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. We are excited to have them both onboard!
    • With the start of a new Cooperative Agreement on March 1st, NASA requested an expansion of ADS content to provide better coverage of Heliophysics and Planetary Science. We look forward to better serving both communities in the coming months and years.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of March 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: Added warning if website accessed via a proxy URL, improved highlights functionality, feedback form UI improvements
      • [fixed] Search engine: fixed ASCII folding issue
      • [ops] Website: Feedback form fixes, dependencies clean-up, animation functionality improvements
      • [ops] Made several services (citations, graphics, metrics, object) compatible with Python 3
      • [ops] Search engine: upgraded to Solr v.7
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 58,000 new bibcodes, 785,000 new citations
Development details

February 2021

  • Announcements:
  • Development and data holdings updates as of February 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website: Search bar autocomplete improvements
      • [ops] Website: optimizations, build improvements, feedback form fixes
      • [ops] Search engine: fix for analysis error during indexing
      • [ops] Fixed rate limit response headers and affinity after separating solr-service from adsws
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 158,000 new bibcodes, 1,710,000 new citations
Development details

January 2021

  • Announcements:
    • ADS will participate in the upcoming virtual AAS 237th meeting. Visit us at our booth! And come to our webinar, “Get your Personalized Notifications and Recommendations from ADS,” on Tuesday, January 12, at 4:30pm EST
    • The ADS database has reached 15 million records and over 131 million citations!
    • ADS is now an official member of the ORCID US community, via our parent institution, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which gives us greater access to the ORCID ecosystem. With this upgrade, we hope to improve our ORCID integration over the coming year
  • Development and data holdings updates as of January 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Help pages: linked to new welcome video and new myADS help video
      • [improved] Website: speed improvements, better browser support, better error handling
      • [fixed] Libraries: fix for too-long library names
      • [fixed] Website: fixed issue with URLs not accepting query params preceded by “?”
      • [ops] Updated and improved new feedback form infrastructure
      • [ops] Updated infrastructure for a number of microservices to support Python 3
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 54,400 new bibcodes, 576,000 new citations
Development details

December 2020

  • Announcements:
    • We (virtually) held our annual ADS Users Group meeting November 19th and 20th, where we updated our advisory committee on our progress this year and plans for the future. The presentations from the meeting are now available and the committee’s report will be available soon.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of December 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] The “Submit Updates” feedback forms have been updated and incorporated into the new ADS and no longer point to the old Classic forms.
      • [new] About page: added agenda and presentations from the latest ADSUG meeting, added new team members to Team page
      • [improved] Help pages: Updated FAQs to include info on building ADS URLs using arXiv IDs and DOIs and to add a pointer to the data & curation FAQs
      • [fixed] Website fixes: fixed bug in Manage Collaborators tab in libraries, cleaned up requests sent when submitting a search, fixed bug in search examples on Modern Form, fixed /search(/) redirect and previous page bug
      • [fixed] Export: removed linebreak from BibTex author list
      • [fixed] Search engine: fixed non-ASCII double quotes bug, fixed the multi-token on first position error
      • [ops] Recommendations and docmatch: updated endpoints to remove beta underscore, made connection pool optional, removed refereed from the query for querying for publisher to get matched to arXiv
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 57,400 new bibcodes, 883,000 new citations
Development details

November 2020

  • Announcements:
    • ADS is hiring! We’re looking for a machine learning engineer interested in deep learning and natural language processing—find the application linked on our Careers page.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of November 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Recommender: New service recommends articles of interest to the reader based on their history or that of other readers with similar interests
      • [new] Website: added A/B testing infrastructure
      • [new] Help pages: Added page on how we select journals for inclusion in our database, added info to our FAQs about our tools for assisting with NSF grant applications
      • [fixed] Export: Added missing DOIs, removed line wrap in abstract in fielded format, fixed XML format header
      • [fixed] Fix for non-ASCII characters in general queries
      • [ops] Website: Fix build issue affecting cache-busting
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 40,000 new bibcodes, 747,000 new citations
Development details

October 2020

  • Announcements:
    • We have added personalized recommendations to the ADS home page. The next time you go to the homepage, look for the “Recommendations” tab to find papers that may be relevant to your recent reading history. In order to take advantage of this feature, make sure you have an ADS user account and are logged into the system so it can remember who you are.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of October 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website improvements: Affiliations facet renamed to Institutions, added Legacy Services in About menu, repositioned buttons on export page
      • [improved] Export: Added IEEE export format, added %pc for page_count to custom format
      • [improved] myADS email notifications: now use a smart date range—if email processing fails one day, the date range will cover the missed days
      • [improved] Help pages and blog URLs now use our standard domain name (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu). Note that saved links that use the old domain, adsabs.github.io, will still work
      • [fixed] Website fixes: fix for arXiv ID not showing on abstract page, made library permissions errors more readable, allowed for collection and property query params in Classic Form URLs, fixed logout bug
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 73,000 new bibcodes, 980,000 new citations
Development details

September 2020

  • Announcements:
    • ADS has written a white paper for the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey recommending we support planetary science literature, data products, and software at the same level that we currently support astrophysics. To sign on, add your name to the document by September 14, 2020.
    • ADS is hiring! We’re seeking out a front-end software developer with experience in UX—find the application linked on our Careers page.
    • The ADS Users Group will virtually hold their next annual meeting November 19–20, 2020. Contact an ADSUG member if you have feedback for the project.
  • Development and data holdings updates as of September 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] New blog post about the myADS email notifications service
      • [improved] myADS notifications: updates to allow private libraries to be included in notifications
      • [improved] Website: accessibility updates, improvements to handling of landing page example links
      • [improved] Help pages: similar() operator added to second-order operators help page
      • [fixed] Website: fix to make sure search bar clears, fix bug when parsing url strings with non-encoded ‘%’
      • [fixed] Propagate HTTP search errors instead of failing with 500 status code
      • [ops] Fixed Slack comment encoding
      • [ops] Updated adsmutils version, rate limits in solr-service
      • [ops] Remove reliance on QID for general myADS queries
      • [ops] Better verification of access tokens in the vault service
      • [ops] Disallow inactive accounts from signing in
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 61,041 more bibcodes, 753,916 more citations
Development details

August 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of August 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [New] Framework for creating A/B experiments added to UI
      • [Fixed] Several minor maintenance releases to a couple of microservices
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 64,465 more bibcodes, 753,524 more citations
Development details

July 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of July 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [Fixed] Several fixes to UI, among which
        • Several fixes for myADS
        • Missing capturing full ORCID ids when last character ‘X’
        • Make library collaborators component fetch users
        • Update error handling and fix initial dispatch for adding library collaborators
      • [improvement] All microservices have been updates to work with a new rate limits configuration
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 80,483 more bibcodes, 896,335 more citations
Development details

June 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of June 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Add myADS dashboard
      • [new] Blog post on updates to the UI
      • [improvement] Customize Settings is now called Settings
      • [Fixed] Fix to bug in delete button for Custom Format (in Settings)
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 145,262 more bibcodes, 624,039 more citations
Development details

May 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of May 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Add help menu showing hotkeys
      • [improved] Add new journal format preference
      • [fixed] Libraries now return library owner correctly
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 70,057 more bibcodes, 2,846,429 more citations
Development details

April 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of April 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Libraries: improved readability of emails notifying users of updated permissions
      • [ops] Released myADS backend for beta testing
      • [ops] Made author_count a stored field to support optimized UI requests
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 76,515 more bibcodes, 1,399,160 more citations
      • [ops] New GCN Circulars are now being added on a weekly basis, and missing abstracts and metadata for older abstracts are slowly being filled in
Development details

March 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of March 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Can now add library collaborators with varying permission levels, under Manage Collaborators on the library’s page
      • [new] Can now exclude selected records from a results list
      • [new] Simple hotkeys are now available for the search results page, such as using the left and right arrows to page through results (full documentation forthcoming)
      • [improved] Website improvements: improved linking to help pages and accessibility documents, added simple search on libraries page, improved styling for printing the results page, no longer wrapping the current query with extraneous parentheses when running a second-order query from the Explore menu
      • [improved] Export improvements: added doctype of editorial, which maps to @article in BibTeX; now support BibTeX export without AASTeX macros; improved tech report output; added enumeration to BibTeX cite keys if duplicates exist in the export
      • [improved] Search: improved query parsing
      • [fixed] Fix issues on abstract page related to showing the abstract and expanding author lists
      • [fixed] Export fixes: removed quotes around month and year in BibTeX exports, no longer encoding linefeeds for html encoding, now exporting DOI if no volume and page exist for a record
      • [fixed] Search: implemented a fix for long phrase searches that timeout or return no results
      • [fixed] Fix for entry dates in myADS email query links
      • [ops] Website: improved Google Analytics implementation by removing duplicate calls
      • [ops] Search: implemented better handling and protections for long-running searches
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 54,037 more bibcodes and 697,752 more citations
Development details

February 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of February 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Search: Added affil as virtual field for affiliations, including aff, aff_id, inst fields
      • [new] New blog post on searching by author affiliations
      • [new] The ADS Users Group final report for the November 2019 meeting is now available on the ADSUG page
      • [new] Added Accessibility page to the help pages
      • [improved] Users will be emailed when their library permissions are changed
      • [improved] Website improvements: updated fields listing in “All Search Terms” dropdown menu and autocomplete, including changing “database” to “collection” in autocomplete to better match facets; added Clear buttons to Paper Form
      • [improved] Export: for BibTeX book exports, use pub instead of pub_raw and aff instead of aff_raw
      • [improved] Help pages: added search syntax for author_count field, removed outdated Classic references, renamed “Tutorials” section to “Troubleshooting” and cleaned up contents, added link to YouTube channel in “Videos” section
      • [fixed] Fixed bug for too-long library descriptions
      • [fixed] Export: fixed AASTeX format with comma in citation before ampersand (&)
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 27,235 more bibcodes, 363,886 more citations
      • [fixed] Bug fixes to resolve a number of errors in the fulltext extraction pipeline, including removing non-standard parsing, ignoring poorly formatted facilities information, expanding the encoding and decoding used by the XML parser to use in the HTML parser, and improving CDATA removal to handle invalid XML content
Development details

January 2020

  • Development and data holdings updates as of January 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Website improvements: accessibility updates to bring site to WCAG 2.0 AA & AAA baselines; if query entered in all caps returns no results, suggest a lowercase version of the query
      • [improved] Added API support for export of individual citation/usage histograms (equivalent to the Classic nph-ref_history?refs=CITATIONSi|AR)
      • [improved] Updated search syntax: collection: can now be searched as for database:, as in collection:astronomy
      • [fixed] Website fixes: fixed potential security issue; increased number of papers that can be processed at once in metrics
      • [fixed] Fixed bug in author wildcard search
      • [fixed] Bugfix for generating transliterations
      • [fixed] Classic query translator: fixed issue with db_key2 translation in myADS queries; bugfixes for arXiv queries in myADS; fix to verify that dates are valid numbers; bugfix if a start param is provided but an ending param is not
      • [ops] In the citation helper, use the token of the user instead of the service-level token
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 85,622 more records, 974,312 more citations
      • 162 notebooks from the PHaEDRA project were added (representing 34,797 scans)
      • [new] The fulltext pipeline is now extracting facilities information where available
      • [ops] A Unicode bug was fixed in the fulltext pipeline, reducing overall extraction error rate by a factor of 20
      • [ops] A test version of the new myADS pipeline was deployed for debugging and testing for future release
Development details

December 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of December 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Updates to the Paper Form: added ApJL to Publication field autocomplete; added a link to a full list of available bibstems
      • [improved] Improved access for reference managers
      • [improved] Added unicode support for author affiliation report
      • [improved] Added several new data link types
      • [fixed] Fixes to the Paper Form: removed the requirement to provide a Publication in the Journal Search, updated styling
      • [fixed] Fixes to the author affiliation report, including selecting the first non-(None) entries in author affiliations
      • [fixed] Fixes in the export service, including adding an attribute to the Dublin Core XML (DC-XML)
      • [fixed] Fixes and improvements to myADS query translations
      • [ops] Improved internal logging
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 45,328 more records, 506,719 more citations
      • [ops] A Solr schema change required reprocessing all bibliographic data
      • [ops] The affiliations database was updated with new affiliations strings
      • [ops] Over the past week, 99.8% of queries returned successfully
      • [ops] The fulltext pipeline now has error reporting
Development details

November 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of November 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Basic, HTML version of ADS now available; links are shown in the splash screen and footer
      • [new] “A Final Farewell to ADS Classic,” a blog post with more information about the retirement of Classic
      • [new] Added information on data curation and availability, formerly available in ADS Classic, to a new Legacy menu in the help pages
      • [new] Added handling for myADS queries linked in Classic-generated myADS emails
      • [improved] Updates to the Paper Form, including addition of the reference resolver and styling updates
      • [improved] Updates to the Classic Form, including addition of a sort selection and a General collection checkbox; collection checkboxes now respect user settings selections, have updated wording
      • [improved] Library updates: deleting an item from a library no longer takes you back to the first page of the library
      • [improved] Added authorcutoff option for BibTeX export, to specify the max number of authors to show
      • [improved] Added search syntax for searching for affiliations to help pages
      • [improved] Added Github data source
      • [improved] For redirected links from Classic, all warnings about using AND vs OR have been removed; ORs are no longer converted to ANDs
      • [fixed] Fixes to Classic Form keyword parsing
      • [fixed] Fixed normalized citation count on results page
      • [fixed] Fixed bug that caused some Library Link URLs to not work properly
      • [fixed] Export service: fixed ADS fielded format to return ISSN instead of ISBN
      • [ops] Update website to use jQuery to v2.2.4, added Reactify plugin
      • [ops] Converted bigquery to use docs
      • [ops] Internal improvements to the resolver gateway and resolver microservice
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 37,583 more records, 605,305 more citations
      • [ops] Our VMWare-based pipeline servers had to be restarted.
      • [ops] Over the last week, 99.93% of queries returned successfully.
Development details

October 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of October 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Added option to transfer ownership of a library, accessible from the Manage Access tab in the library
      • [new] In Application Settings, added the ability to set a default search form (Modern, Classic, Paper)
      • [new] Added infrastructure endpoint to eventually support myADS settings imports
      • [improved] If sidebars are hidden, requests to populate them are now blocked to improve load speed
      • [improved] Library exports are now using the docs() syntax, to improve speed
      • [improved] Added more flexibility for specifying BibTeX key format and max author settings for BibTeX and BibTeX ABS formats
      • [improved] Improved scoring algorithm deployed; sort by score to use
      • [fixed] Bug fixes to web interface: Classic search form now respects collections preferences set in Application Settings, fixed bug that caused the number of results to occasionally disappear on the results page, fixed bug for displaying special characters in the publication field on the abstract page
      • [fixed] Fixed which field is being exported as the publisher field
      • [ops] Add more info to logging requests
      • [ops] Streamlined and added to Google Analytics timing logging
      • [ops] Internal updates to builds and dependencies
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 53,878 more records, 613,711 more citations
      • [fixed] Fixed citation_count field, some records had no value instead of a 0
      • [fixed] Reviewed and fixed metadata parse issues for all bibcodes
      • [fixed] Fixed publication data on PNAS records
      • [fixed] Fixed 2019GeoJI records.
      • [ops] Updated affiliation field for all bibcodes
      • [ops] Over the last week, 99.99% of queries returned successfully.
      • [ops] Fulltext pipeline XML extraction updated to BeautifulSoup4
Development details

September 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of September 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Activated symbolic date math logic. Searches like entdate:[“NOW-1MONTH” TO NOW] will now work
      • [new] Videos section added to help pages, including recordings of Office Hours talks
      • [improved] Several improvements to Solr search engine scoring: improved the algorithm for choosing amongst synonyms, updated handling of multi-phrase synonyms, improved relevancy scoring, allow for multi-multi-valued affiliations (e.g. authors with multiple affiliations), improved handling of author accents with transliterations
      • [improved] Added clarification to Help pages’ FAQ section about replacements for Classic’s “Get citation lists” and “Get reference lists” functions
      • [fixed] Bug fixes to export service: better detection of math mode, limit the number of authors in MNRAS-style export
      • [fixed] Fixed bug when there is a caret in the query string in object searches
      • [fixed] Fixes to Solr search engine scoring: fixed NGC object search handling/tokenization, fixed year:xxxx-yyyy searches, fixed issue with constant scoring for position searches, fixed bugs affecting authors with multiple initials, scoring fix for first-author search using the caret (^) operator
      • [ops] More info included with feedback form emails
      • [ops] Better internal logging, including logging user ID with requests
      • [ops] Better error handling for failed cone object searches
      • [ops] Improved Solr warm-up, for performance
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 47,005 more records, 835,256 more citations
      • [fixed] Fixed bug in search code that affected 0.5% of facet searches. Now, 99.97% of queries return now successfully.
      • [fixed] The fulltext pipeline had inconsistent encoding issues that were fixed by detecting the encoding of a file and decoding it before parsing.
      • [ops] Daily updates failed on two occasions, one due to central server room network issues and one from an abnormally large log file filling a disk.
      • [ops] Updated 24469 ICRC records, 4309 arXiv records, 1114 Zenodo records, and 25 Minor Planet Bulletin records.
      • [ops] Improved handling and internal reporting of fulltext pipeline errors.
Development details

August 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of August 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Citation key in BibTeX exports is now configurable
      • [new] Maximum number of authors to display in a BibTeX export is now configurable
      • [new] Documentation: object search syntax added to search syntax help pages, new tutorial available for generating files for UI troubleshooting
      • [new] New blog post on user-developed tools
      • [improved] Updates to feedback form, including added links to correction forms
      • [improved] Application settings page now auto-saves
      • [improved] Documentation: overhaul of custom export format documentation
      • [fixed] Fixed issue for Internet Explorer 11 users
      • [fixed] Updated BibTeX export files to use .bib instead of .bbl extension
      • [fixed] Fixed export menu ordering
      • [fixed] Fixed table of contents bugs
      • [fixed] Fixed library sorting bug
      • [fixed] Fixed property logic in Classic form
      • [fixed] Fixed issue with handling long author list in exports
      • [fixed] Fixed bug for records with a certain EID format that occurred with some export formats
      • [fixed] Updates to date/pubdate and bibstem fields in exports
      • [fixed] Fixed AASTeX export format issue
      • [fixed] Fixed indentation on custom export formats
      • [fixed] No longer doing TeX manipulation of strings in math mode during export
      • [fixed] Fixed several logging error messages
      • [fixed] Fixed cone search functionality in object searches
      • [ops] Now using https instead of http for calls to NED and SIMBAD
      • [ops] Updated rate limiting for searches
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 45,499 more records, 582,817 more citations
      • [ops] References were missing for at least 75 bibcodes. This was corrected by resending all reference data.
      • [ops] Detected at least two bibcodes are missing the arxiv_class field. Correction to metadata has been requested.
      • [ops] Updated our affiliation database with hundreds of new definitions and reprocessed all affiliation strings.
Development details

July 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of July 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Select desired articles and limit search results to the selected set using the new “limit to” button (visible after selecting one or more articles)
      • [new] Search examples on Modern form are now clickable links
      • [improved] Improved wording and functionality when using second-order operators from the Explore menu for a selected group of articles
      • [improved] About menu includes link to What’s New page
      • [fixed] Better error handling and improved performance issues
      • [fixed] Improved client-side caching
      • [fixed] Fixed sorting by normalized citations
      • [fixed] Fixed sorting during export
      • [fixed] Fixed issue to now allow results to open in new tab
      • [ops] Improved session handling
      • [ops] Increased rate limits for legitimate traffic
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 54,835 more records, 767,576 more citations
      • [improved] Improved reliability of data ingest pipeline
      • [improved] Updated solr records to use improved bibstem and institution fields
      • [fixed] Changed default value for normalized citation count field to fix sorting issue
      • [ops] Fixed publisher bibcode for a set of conference papers
      • [ops] Deployed support for author/reviewer attributes
      • [ops] Recovered from server room cooling failure
      • [ops] Fixed links data for workshop
Development details

June 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of June 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Second order operators now available for a manually selected group of articles via the Explore menu
      • [improved] Library set operations - improved: user experience, error handling, default library descriptions, tool tips
      • [improved] Improved usage of reCAPTCHA
      • [improved] Removed day from pubdate quick-field format
      • [improved] Added IRSA data provider
      • [improved] Updated classic form to allow hyphenated search terms
      • [improved] Detect ctrl+click on links to help with Windows users
      • [improved] Added warning messages in the Classic Search Translator for title and abstract search errors
      • [fixed] Fixed routing issue that caused 404 pages to trap users
      • [fixed] Fixed issue causing stuttered scrolling on iOS devices
      • [fixed] Fixed associated papers widget to show properly
      • [fixed] Quote author names by default in classic form
      • [fixed] Fixed export output to remove extraneous characters
      • [fixed] Fixed public library routing Issue, and update other links with same issue
      • [fixed] Fixed library export control to respect selected sort
      • [fixed] Fixed issue causing abstract citation list to have wrong title
      • [fixed] Removed synonym replacement for object searches
      • [ops] Added content-type for bigquery requests from several internal services
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 61,016 more bibcodes, 719,093 more citations
      • [improved] Overnight arXiv records are now available sooner, due to code improvements
      • [improved] Improved error handling for OCR errors in papers
      • [improved] Improved generation of bibcodes when the page number overflows its field
      • [improved] Improved quality of metrics data
      • [new] In development: code to generate pages for web crawlers
Development details

May 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of May 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [new] Implemented lazy loading of widgets to improve site performance
      • [new] New feature: library set operations, available under Action button within library module
      • [new] New search field: “inst” (institution) field is now available for users to search the set of curated affiliations, currently available from the left-side filters; this complements the existing “aff” (affiliation) field, which allows users to search the uncurated text of this field
      • [improved] Additional export formats added to be more compatible with Classic-style export
      • [improved] arXiv ID is now pushed with ORCID claims to improve record matching on the ORCID site
      • [improved] Improvements to showing/hiding the sidebars
      • [improved] Improved UX on fast connections
      • [improved] arXiv ID added to abstract screens
      • [fixed] Fix for default naming in library set operations
      • [fixed] Fixed several bugs for exporting citations: fixed G author format, fixed journal name for macro matching, fixes to be more compatible with Classic-style export
      • [fixed] Fixed several bugs in Classic query translator: fixed bugs in parsing bibstems to include/exclude, fixed bug when querying for a single author, fixed bug to ensure database selection is passed, cleaned up error messages
      • [fixed] Fixed bug to speed site load
      • [fixed] Fixed several ORCID bugs related to the ORCID login, claiming records with no abstract, claiming/updating records using an alternate bibcode, updating records from the ORCID profile screen, requiring user to log into ORCID again if ORCID login has expired
      • [fixed] Fixes to the Classic and Paper forms
      • [fixed] Fixes to library interface including who could view public libraries, fix for viewing large libraries in search results screen, fix for adding record to a library from the abstract screen
      • [fixed] Numerous bug fixes in the user interface to improve user experience
      • [fixed] Fixes to link handling and routing
      • [fixed] Fixes to ensure compatibility with older browsers and for users who have Google blocked
      • [ops] Fix to internal user account cleanup script
      • [ops] Infrastructure to support forthcoming new feature: docs() operator, for performing operations on a selected group of articles or library
      • [ops] Initial deployment of service to load static pages for abstracts to improve site speed; service still in development
      • [ops] Internal build-related updates, updates to continuous integration, updates to unit testing infrastructure
      • [ops] Changes in how errors from the Classic query translator are handled
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 51,795 more bibcodes, 799,237 more citations
      • [improved] Complete records from arXiv papers are now searchable several hours earlier.
      • [ops] Performance of our search engines continues to be monitored and improved.
Development details

April 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of April 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [fixed] Fixed error for users with no works on their ORCID profiles
      • [operations] Updated “CXO” to “Chandra” as a data source name
      • [operations] Updated expiration dates for access tokens
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 57,929 more bibcodes, 836,963 more citations
      • [new] The augment affiliation pipeline was productized and has reprocessed millions of affiliation records
      • [improved] The full text pipeline was improved to better handle text in appendices and text from specific publishers
      • [improved] Production search engine performance has been improved
      • [operations] We had some issues with a Solr search engine instance restarting; we are still investigating
Development details

March 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of March 1st:
    • Website and API
      • [improved] Better handling of requests to API to improve speed
      • [improved] Major back-end ORCID update, including many speed improvements, particularly for users with large profiles
      • [improved] Added new CfA logo to footer, updated footer styling
      • [improved] “Export” renamed to “Export Citation” on abstract page
      • [improved] Added “entdate” field and “similar” operator to Quick Fields menu
      • [fixed] Fixed issue where default database/collection was not always applied, even if set in preferences
      • [fixed] Fixed handling if an ORCID login fails
      • [fixed] Operators that require sorting by score are now sorting properly
      • [fixed] Copying and pasting into the search box no longer triggers the autocomplete
      • [fixed] Fixed export of accented characters
      • [fixed] Fixed behavior of %U, which outputs the URL of the bibcode, in custom export
      • [fixed] Year and month in BibTeX export are now wrapped in double quotes, per the BibTeX standard
      • [fixed] Fixed line breaks in the author and editor fields in the BibTeX export to not wrap in the middle of a name
    • Data holdings and pipelines
      • 65,903 more bibcodes, 769,972 more citations
      • [improved] We deployed improvements to our orcid pipeline and our master pipeline.
      • [improved] We continued to productize the affiliation enhancement pipeline.
      • [operations] Zendo based software citations ran in production mode.
      • [operations] All pipelines ran without interruptions for the month.
Development details

February 2019

  • Development and data holdings updates as of February 1st:
  • Website and API
    • [new] Set operations (union, intersection, difference, copy) available for libraries when using the API (not yet available in the browser).
    • [fixed] Fixed how the custom export handles user-supplied LaTeX commands.
    • [operations] Internal improvements to request handling.
  • Data holdings and pipelines
    • 32,886 more bibcodes, 527,614 more citations
    • [new] Results of our affiliation enhancement project are becoming visible to users. We deployed improved affiliation data and faceted search support for several million bibcodes.
    • [new] Our first software citations via Zenodo (bibstem:zndo) are available.
    • [operations] Ingest pipelines was down for a day due to server room issues.
Development details


🌓