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.
[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
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
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
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
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
[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 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
astrophysics data system