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.
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
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.
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
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:
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
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
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
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 will be at the upcoming 240th meeting of AAS in Pasadena, CA. Visit us at our booth in the exhibit hall (in person or virtually)! We’ll have several presentations and iPosters at the meeting as well:
NASA hyperwall talk: “How to find Experts Using the ADS,” Monday, June 13 @ 9:46 am
“What’s New @ ADS” presentation at the exhibitors’ showcase, Monday, June 13 at 1:00 pm
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)
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:
[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
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.
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:
astrophysics data system