Astrophysics Data System

Astrophysics Data System

The Astrophysics Data System is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers. It was developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is managed by the Harvard–Smithsonian Center forAstrophysics. Papers are indexed within the database by their bibliographic record, containing of the journal they were published in and associated metadata.

About Astrophysics Data System in brief

Summary Astrophysics Data SystemThe Astrophysics Data System is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers. It was developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is managed by the Harvard–Smithsonian Center forAstrophysics. Abstracts are available free online for almost all articles, and full scanned articles are available in Graphics Interchange Format and Portable Document Format for older articles. The service is distributed worldwide, with twelve mirror sites in twelve countries on five continents, with the database synchronized by means of weekly updates using rsync. Papers are indexed within the database by their bibliographic record, containing of the journal they were published in and associated metadata, such as author lists, references and citations. Originally this data was stored in an ASCII format, but eventually the database maintainers migrated to an XML format in 2000. Scanned articles are usually available by agreement with the journal publishers, and are stored at both high resolution and medium resolution. Since the advent of online editions of journals, abstracts are loaded into the ADS on the publication date of the full articles, with text available to subscribers to the full journal text. The system is estimated to have tripled the readership of astronomical journals. Studies have found that the benefit to astronomy of the ADS is equivalent to several hundred million US dollars annually, and the system is almost universal among astronomers worldwide. The number of users of the service quadrupled in the five weeks following the introduction of theADS web-based service. Since about 1995, the number of ADS users has doubled roughly every two years.

The database now has agreements with almost all astronomical journals, who supply abstracts. Scaned articles from as far back as the early 19th century are available via the service, which now contains over 8 million documents. The amount of research an astronomer carries out is related to the per capita gross domestic product of the country in which heshe is based, and that the total amount ofResearch done in a country is proportional to the square of its GDP divided by its population. The creators believed this was the first use of the Internet to allow simultaneous querying of transatlantic scientific databases. Until 1994, the service was available via proprietary network software, but it was transferred to the nascent World Wide Web early that year. At first, the journal articles available via ADS were scanned bitmaps created from the paper journals, but from 1995 onwards, the Astrophysical Journal began to publish an on-line edition, soon followed by the other main journals such as Astronomy and Astroph physics and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The authors of the electronic editions of these journals have provided links to these electronic editions from their first appearance. Older articles have been scanned using an optical character recognition software using an high resolution TIFF format, and have been made available by the publishers before about 1995. The information is stored in the database in an XML element, with various sub-elements for the various metadata, including author lists and citations for the articles.