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] 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
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.
On August 16th, ADS welcomed Jenny March 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
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
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
[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
[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
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
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
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
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:
astrophysics data system