Full Text Searching in the Astrophysics Data System

TL;DR

The paper describes the development of a comprehensive full-text search system for the astrophysics literature within the NASA/Smithsonian ADS, integrating scanned and electronic sources for enhanced scholarly research.

Contribution

It introduces a unified full-text search system that combines scanned historical literature with electronic publications, enabling comprehensive and efficient literature searches in astrophysics.

Findings

Search system covers all major and many smaller astronomy journals.

Integrates multiple external search systems for broader coverage.

Provides free access to a vast digital astrophysics literature database.

Abstract

The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides a search system for the astronomy and physics scholarly literature. All major and many smaller astronomy journals that were published on paper have been scanned back to volume 1 and are available through the ADS free of charge. All scanned pages have been converted to text and can be searched through the ADS Full Text Search System. In addition, searches can be fanned out to several external search systems to include the literature published in electronic form. Results from the different search systems are combined into one results list. The ADS Full Text Search System is available at: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/fulltext_service.html