Furthering a Comprehensive SETI Bibliography

TL;DR

This paper updates and refines a comprehensive SETI bibliography by developing a systematic search workflow and expanding its scope to include social sciences and commensal SETI, ensuring more accurate and efficient future updates.

Contribution

It introduces a new search workflow and curated library to improve the accuracy and scope of the SETI bibliography, including false positive management.

Findings

Added 553 new relevant publications to the bibliography.

Developed a workflow to minimize false positives in literature searches.

Expanded scope to include social sciences and commensal SETI.

Abstract

In 2019, Reyes & Wright used the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) to initiate a comprehensive bibliography for SETI accessible to the public. Since then, updates to the library have been incomplete, partly due to the difficulty in managing the large number of false positive publications generated by searching ADS using simple search terms. In preparation for a recent update, the scope of the library was revised and reexamined. The scope now includes social sciences and commensal SETI. Results were curated based on five SETI keyword searches: "SETI", "technosignature", "Fermi Paradox," "Drake Equation", and "extraterrestrial intelligence." These keywords returned 553 publications that merited inclusion in the bibliography that were not previously present. A curated library of false positive results is now concurrently maintained to facilitate their exclusion from future searches. A search query and workflow was developed to capture nearly all SETI-related papers indexed by ADS while minimizing false positives. These tools will enable efficient, consistent updates of the SETI library by future curators, and could be adopted for other bibliography projects as well.