Astrophysical Data Systems (ADS) is a freely accessible bibliographic database and full-text archive for publications in the fields of astronomy, physics, and geophysics.  Funded by NASA, it contains over 13 million documents, including journal articles, preprints, books, conference proceedings, and reports.  Its unique search features and depth make it the primary search tool for astronomers and astrophysicists.  It is also an alternative, user-friendly, interface to ArXiv and one I recently recommended to a physicist who wanted to find preprints that cited other preprints.

ADS offers 2 user interfaces: the Modern Form with a single-line search box and a Classic Form that hearkens back to an earlier UI and provides more search boxes.  Along with the standard article search options, ADS includes search parameters to find articles that include astronomical objects.  Users can search using sky coordinates (RA/DEC) or provide object identifiers from the NED and SIMBAD catalogs. The help documentation is extensive and explains in depth the options for each search term.

The Paper Form tab allows searchers to identify all of the articles in a particular journal or search using a reference string (for example, one pasted from a bibliography).  This tab also links to a long list of journals with their abbreviations which is useful when trying to decipher an unknown citation.

The ADS search results screen is similar to other science article databases, allowing the searcher to limit results using facets on the left and explore the results by year, citations, and reads.  The results page also provides links to a wealth of metrics, not surprising for a database run by scientists.

Users can export records in several formats (BibTeX is the most common format) and notable is the ability to export lists of authors along with their affiliation.  This output is particularly useful for researchers who have to provide a list of all co-authors for grants or tenure/promotion documents.  For researchers looking to download large publication lists, ADS provides an API.

Although the astronomy community it serves is small, ADS contains a broad range of resources across the wider physics disciplines and is recommended because of its powerful and free interface and depth of records and full-text availability.

Sara Russell Gonzalez, Science Librarian, University of Florida

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