Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Since its inception in 1993, the ADS Abstract Service has become an
indispensable research tool for astronomers and astrophysicists worldwide.
In those seven years, much effort has been directed toward improving
both the quantity and the quality of references in the database. From the
original database of approximately 160 000 astronomy abstracts, our
dataset has grown almost tenfold to approximately 1.5 million references
covering astronomy, astrophysics, planetary sciences, physics, optics, and
engineering. We collect and standardize data from
approximately 200 journals and present the resulting information in a
uniform, coherent manner. With the cooperation of journal publishers
worldwide, we have been able to place scans of full journal articles on-line
back to the first volumes of many astronomical journals, and we are able to
link to current version of articles, abstracts, and datasets for
essentially all of the current astronomy literature. The
trend toward electronic publishing in the field, the use of electronic
submission of abstracts for journal articles and conference proceedings,
and the increasingly prominent use of the World Wide Web to disseminate
information have enabled the ADS to build a database unparalleled in other
disciplines.
The ADS can be accessed at:
http://adswww.harvard.edu
Key words: methods: data analysis -- astronomical bibliography
