Alberto Accomazzi

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics · Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an essential tool for researchers that allows them to explore the astronomy and astrophysics scientific literature, but it has yet to exploit recent advances in natural language processing. At ADASS 2021, we introduced astroBERT, a machine learning language model tailored to the text used in astronomy pape...

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a critical research service for the astrophysics community, strives to provide the most accessible and inclusive environment for the discovery and exploration of the astronomical literature. Part of this goal involves creating a digital platform that can accommodate everybody, including those with disabiliti...

The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of P...

We present an overview of best practices for publishing data in astronomy and astrophysics journals. These recommendations are intended as a reference for authors to help prepare and publish data in a way that will better represent and support science results, enable better data sharing, improve reproducibility, and enhance the reusability of data....

We present an overview of best practices for publishing data in astronomy and astrophysics journals. These recommendations are intended as a reference for authors to help prepare and publish data in a way that will better represent and support science results, enable better data sharing, improve reproducibility, and enhance the reusability of data....

In this whitepaper we advocate that the Planetary Science (PS) community build a discipline-specific digital library, in collaboration with the existing astronomy digital library, ADS. We suggest that the PS data archives increase their level of curation to allow for direct linking between the archival data and the derived journal articles. And we...

The Agile manifesto encourages us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, while Scrum, the most adopted Agile development methodology, is essentially based on roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together (i.e., processes). Moreover, it is generally proclaimed that whenever a Scrum project does not succeed,...

Data and software citations are crucial for the transparency of research results and for the transmission of credit. But they are hard to track, because of the absence of a common citation standard. As a consequence, the FORCE11 recently proposed data and software citation principles as guidance for authors. Zenodo is recognized for the implementat...

We write in response to the call from the 2020 Decadal Survey to submit white papers illustrating the most pressing scientific questions in astrophysics for the coming decade. We propose exploration as the central question for the Decadal Committee's discussions.The history of astronomy shows that paradigm changing discoveries are not driven by wel...

We write in response to the call from the 2020 Decadal Survey to submit white papers illustrating the most pressing scientific questions in astrophysics for the coming decade. We propose exploration as the central question for the Decadal Committee's discussions. The history of astronomy shows that paradigm changing discoveries are not driven by we...

Some of the most exciting and promising areas of Astronomy research today are found at the boundaries of the discipline: the search for Exoplanets and Multi-Messenger Astronomy. In order to achieve breakthroughs in these research fields over the next decade, innovation and expansion of the digital information infrastructure which supports this rese...

The new NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is designed with a serviceoriented architecture (SOA) that consists of multiple customized Apache Solr search engine instances plus a collection of microservices, containerized using Docker, and deployed in Amazon Web Services (AWS). For complex systems, like the ADS, this loosely coupled architecture can...

Conceptually exoplanet research has one foot in the discipline of Astrophysics and the other foot in Planetary Science. Research strategies for exoplanets will require efficient access to data and information from both realms. Astrophysics has a sophisticated, well integrated, distributed information system with archives and data centers which are...

Scientific publications have evolved several features for mitigating vocabulary mismatch when indexing, retrieving, and computing similarity between articles. These mitigation strategies range from simply focusing on high-value article sections, such as titles and abstracts, to assigning keywords, often from controlled vocabularies, either manually...

In this paper we provide an update concerning the operations of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), its services and user interface, and the content currently indexed in its database. As the primary information system used by researchers in Astronomy, the ADS aims to provide a comprehensive index of all scholarly resources appearing in the lit...

NASA regards data handling and archiving as an integral part of space missions, and has a strong track record of serving astrophysics data to the public, beginning with the the IRAS satellite in 1983. Archives enable a major science return on the significant investment required to develop a space mission. In fact, the presence and accessibility of...

Since the turn of the millennium a constant concern of astronomical archives have begun providing data to the public through standardized protocols unifying data from disparate physical sources and wavebands across the electromagnetic spectrum into an astronomical virtual observatory (VO). In October 2014, NASA began support for the NASA Astronomic...

We discuss current efforts behind the curation of observing proposals, archive bibliographies, and data links in the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). The primary data in the ADS is the bibliographic content from scholarly articles in Astronomy and Physics, which ADS aggregates from publishers, arXiv and conference proceeding sites. This core bi...

The ADS platform is undergoing the biggest rewrite of its 20-year history. While several components have been added to its architecture over the past couple of years, this talk will concentrate on the underpinnings of ADS's search layer and its API. To illustrate the design of the components in the new system, we will show how the new ADS user inte...

Four years after the last LISA meeting, the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) finds itself in the middle of major changes to the infrastructure and contents of its database. In this paper we highlight a number of features of great importance to librarians and discuss the additional functionality that we are currently developing. Starting in 2011,...

Finding measures for research impact, be it for individuals, institutions, instruments or projects, has gained a lot of popularity. More papers than ever are being written on new impact measures, and problems with existing measures are being pointed out on a regular basis. Funding agencies require impact statistics in their reports, job candidates...

In the spring of 1993, the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) first launched its bibliographic search system. It was known then as the ADS Abstract Service, a component of the larger Astrophysics Data System effort which had developed an interoperable data system now seen as a precursor of the Virtual Observatory. As a result of the ma...

We describe a collaborative effort to update and unify the various vocabularies currently in use in Astronomy into a single thesaurus that can be further developed and updated through broad community participation. The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) will be an open, interoperable and community-supported thesaurus which unifies the existing diver...

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) has been working hard on updating its services and interfaces to better support our community's research needs. ADS Labs is a new interface built on the old tried-and-true ADS Abstract Databases, so all of ADS's content is available through it. In this presentation we highlight the new features that have been...

We introduce \emph{Astronomy and Computing}, a new journal for the growing population of people working in the domain where astronomy overlaps with computer science and information technology. The journal aims to provide a new communication channel within that community, which is not well served by current journals, and to help secure recognition o...

Assessing the impact of astronomical facilities rests upon an evaluation of the scientific discoveries which their data have enabled. Telescope bibliographies, which link data products with the literature, provide a way to use bibliometrics as an impact measure for the underlying data. In this paper we argue that the creation and maintenance of tel...

Astronomy has long had a working network of archives supporting the curation of publications and data. The discipline has already created many of the features which perplex other areas of science: (1) data repositories: (supra)national institutes, dedicated to large projects; a culture of user-contributed data; practical experience of long-term dat...

Is there a difference in citation rates between articles that were published with links to data and articles that were not? Besides being interesting from a purely academic point of view, this question is also highly relevant for the process of furthering science. Data sharing not only helps the process of verification of claims, but also the disco...

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) grew up with and has been riding the waves of the Information Age, closely monitoring and anticipating the needs of its end-users. By now, all professional astronomers are using the ADS on a daily basis, and a substantial fraction have been using it for their entire professional career. In addition to bei...

ADS Labs is a platform that ADS is introducing in order to test and receive feedback from the community on new technologies and prototype services. Currently, ADS Labs features a new interface for abstract searches, faceted filtering of results, visualization of co-authorship networks, article-level recommendations, and a full-text search service....

In the coming era of data-intensive science, it will be increasingly important to be able to seamlessly move between scientific results, the data analyzed in them, and the processes used to produce them. As observations, derived data products, publications, and object metadata are curated by different projects and archived in different locations, e...

In the current era of data-intensive science, it is increasingly important for researchers to be able to have access to published results, the supporting data, and the processes used to produce them. Six years ago, recognizing this need, the American Astronomical Society and the Astrophysics Data Centers Executive Committee (ADEC) sponsored an effo...

Authors publish because they want to transfer information. An essential ingredient for this transfer is being able to find this information. As the Literature Universe is expanding rapidly, finding your way in this deluge of information can be a daunting task. How do you find what you are looking for in a reasonable amount of time and more importan...

Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our community and has the potential to transform the way data are described, curated and preserved. Based on the lesso...

The universe of potentially interesting, searchable literature is expanding continuously. Besides the normal expansion, there is an additional influx of literature because of interdisciplinary boundaries becoming more and more diffuse. Hence, the need for accurate, efficient and intelligent search tools is bigger than ever. Even with a sophisticate...

Over the past decade, astronomers have been using an increasingly larger number of web-based applications and archives to conduct their research. However, despite the early success in creating links across projects and data centers, the promise of a single integrated digital library environment supporting e-science in astronomy has proven elusive....

The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System exists at the nexus of a dense system of interacting and interlinked information networks. The syntactic and the semantic content of this multipartite graph structure can be combined to provide very specific research recommendations to the scientist/user. Comment: To appear in ADASS XIX, ASP Conf Proc

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides various free services for finding, accessing, and managing bibliographic data, including a basic search form, the myADS notification service, and private library capabilities (a useful tool for building bibliographies), plus access to scanned pages of published articles. The ADS also provides pow...

Although powerful, list searches have their limitations. Using second order bibliometric operators \citep{kurtz02} in the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), one is able to easily find review papers or the most popular papers on a given subject. Because of their one-dimensionality, lists cannot display a rich context for a given paper. The bes...

Eight years after the ADS first appeared the last decadal survey wrote: "NASA's initiative for the Astrophysics Data System has vastly increased the accessibility of the scientific literature for astronomers. NASA deserves credit for this valuable initiative and is urged to continue it." Here we summarize some of the changes concerning the ADS whic...

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides various free services for finding, accessing, and managing bibliographic data, including a basic search form, the myADS notification service, and private libraries, plus access to scanned published articles.

The data holdings, usage and citation records of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) form a unique environment for bibliometric studies. Here we will highlight one such study. Using the citation and usage statistics from the NASA Astrophysics Data System, we study the impact of offering a paper as an electronic pre-print (“e-print”) on the arXi...

Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables and challenges effective astronomical research, requiring new approaches. Thus far, astronomy has tended to add...

Archives are widely recognized as a valuable resource for astronomy, but statistics on their use indicates they are even more important than most astronomers realize. Obviously much of the science from survey projects such as SDSS relies on the archive. Perhaps more surprisingly, archival data are also a major contributor to the science from target...

In this paper we present a number of metrics for usage of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Since the ADS is used by the entire astronomical community, these are indicative of how the astronomical literature is used. We will show how the use of the ADS has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. We will also show that different ty...

In the past 12 months, we have added over a million records to the ADS Abstract Service. This is the equivalent of a 20% increase, or about double the rate of increase that the ADS has seen in recent years. This significant increase in size is due to the addition of several large datasets including historical data from many Springer astronomy and p...

The ADS has undertaken the high-resolution digitization of color and grayscale content for journals available in its fulltext article archive. The original scans in the archive were created over 10 years ago by capturing journal pages as bitonal images, which provide poor detail for plates and illustrations. During the current phase of this effort...

Imagine having access to a free, electronic weekly newsletter, keeping you up-to-date with your field of interest. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Actually, there is such a service: myADS. You can totally customize myADS to your needs and interests. This powerful service provides you with a unique view of what is happening in your field of interest. Th...

Over the last few years there has been considerable progress in linking the published scholarly literature with on-line data. This will greatly help with data discovery and aid the efforts to the VO.

The ADS provides various free services for finding, accessing, and managing bibliographic data, including a quick search form, a notification service, and private library capabilities, plus access to 3.3 million scanned pages of published articles.

myADS-arXiv is a collaboration of the Astrophysics Data System group at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatroy and the arXiv group at Cornell University. The myADS-arXiv service provides a listing of those articles in physics or astronomy which have been posted in the last week which are of most interest to you. In essence myADS-arXiv is a free,...

Whenever a large group of people are engaged in an activity, communities will form. The nature of these communities depends on the relationship considered. In the group of people who regularly use scholarly literature, a relationship like ``person i and person j have cited the same paper'' might reveal communities of people working in a particular...

The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides access to the astronomical literature through the World Wide Web. It is a NASA funded project and access to all the ADS services is free to everybody world-wide. It can be accessed without login through any web browser. The ADS Abstract Service allows the searching of three databases with abstracts in Ast...

Are the e-prints (electronic preprints) from the arXiv repository being used instead of journal articles? We show that the e-prints have not undermined the usage of journal papers from the four core journals in astrophysics. As soon as the journal article is published, the astronomical community prefers to read it and the use of e-prints through th...

Over time, scholarly publications become connected through measurable quantities like citations and co-readership. In this way, these publications define an ever-growing, complex network. Studies have shown that this type of network is characterized by a high degree of clustering. We have used this fact to our advantage. The clustering allows us to...

With the mainstream adoption of references to datasets in astronomical manuscripts, researchers today are able to provide direct links from their papers to the original data that were used in their study. Following a process similar to the verification of references in manuscripts, publishers have been working with the NASA Astrophysics Data System...

The ADS announces the beta release of a new portal into the technical literature for physics and astronomy education. This project is being done in collaboration with ComPADRE. Currently the collection contains about 30,000 articles covering the Science Education literature; key journals in the collection include Research in Science Education, Phys...

The ADS is the search system of choice for the astronomical community. It also covers a large part of the physics and physics/astronomy education literature. In order to make access to this system as easy as possible, we developed a Google-like interface version of our search form. This one-field search parses the user input and automatically detec...

The Smithsonian/NASA ADS Abstract Service contains a wealth of data for astronomers and librarians alike, yet the vast majority of usage consists of rudimentary searches. Hints on how to obtain more focused search results by using more of the various capabilities of the ADS are presented, including searching by affiliation. We also discuss the clas...

The NASA Astrophysics Data System in conjunction with the Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is working on a project to microfilm historical observatory publications. The microfilm is then scanned for inclusion in the ADS. The ADS currently contains over 700,000 scanned pages of volumes of historical literature. Many...

With over 20 million records, the ADS citation database is regularly used by researchers and librarians to measure the scientific impact of individuals, groups, and institutions. In addition to the traditional sources of citations, the ADS has recently added references extracted from the arXiv e-prints on a nightly basis. We review the procedures u...

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the central part of the Digital Library in Astronomy. It provides the users with a search system for the astronomical literature and an extensive system of links to on-line resources like data tables, catalogs, on-line journals, etc. The extensive system of linking between on-line resources in Astronomy is...

The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides an extensive system of links between the literature and other on-line information. Recently, the journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and a group of NASA data centers have collaborated to provide more links between on-line data obtained by space missions and the on-line journals. Authors ca...

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 sear...

Technical libraries are currently experiencing very rapid change. In the near future their mission will change, their physical nature will change, and the skills of their employees will change. While some will not be able to make these changes, and will fail, others will lead us into a new era.

The ADS provides a search system for over 4.8 million records in Astronomy, Planetary Sciences, and Physics and 3.3 million scanned pages of the scholarly literature. In order to improve access to the ADS and to make searching easier, we allow Google to index the information in the ADS. Since many scientists use Google as their general search syste...

In this report we examine the change in citation behavior since the introduction of the arXiv e-print repository (Ginsparg, 2001). It has been observed that papers that initially appear as arXiv e-prints get cited more than papers that do not (Lawrence, 2001; Brody et al., 2004; Schwarz & Kennicutt, 2004; Kurtz et al., 2005a, Metcalfe, 2005). Using...

The ADS Abstract Service provides a sophisticated search capability for the literature in astronomy and physics. The ADS is free to anybody world-wide. New features have added significant new functionality to the ADS.

The myADS-arXiv service provides the scientific community with a one stop shop for staying up-to-date with a researcher's field of interest. The service provides a powerful and unique filter on the enormous amount of bibliographic information added to the ADS on a daily basis. It also provides a complete view with the most relevant papers available...

We discuss two techniques used to characterize bibliographic records based on their similarity to and relationship with the contents of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) databases. The first method has been used to classify input text as being relevant to one or more subject areas based on an analysis of the frequency distribution of its indi...

The ADS provides a search system for over 4.4 million records. It covers astronomy, physics, and geosciences. We continue to extract a large number of references from article reference lists. We now have 18 million citing/cited reference pairs. During the last year we implemented an improved version of the "Private Library". This lets you collect a...

Using the citation and read statistics from the NASA Astrophysical Data System (ADS), we investigate the significance and impact of pre-publishing a paper as e-print on the arXiv e-print server. It clearly follows that, since the introduction of these e-prints in 1992, their significance has increased to the level that currently the most important...

The Astrophysics Data System is enhancing functionality and access to the Abstract Service in several areas. A new WAIS server running the freeWAIS search engine has been added to the existing HTTP and ANSA-based servers. Abstract coverage will be expanded to include more of the NASA ``RECON'' categories as well as abstracts obtained directly from...

The ADS provides a search system for over 4.3 million records. We continue extracted a large number of references from article reference lists. We now have 18 million citing/cited reference pairs. During the last year we implemented an improved version of the ``Private Library". This lets you collectarticles in different private libraries. This is...

It has been shown (S. Lawrence, 2001, Nature, 411, 521) that journal articles which have been posted without charge on the internet are more heavily cited than those which have not been. Using data from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ads.harvard.edu) and from the ArXiv e-print archive at Cornell University (arXiv.org) we examine the causes of t...

The NASA-ADS Abstract Service provides a sophisticated search capability for the literature in Astronomy, Planetary Sciences, Physics/Geophysics, and Space Instrumentation. The ADS is funded by NASA and access to the ADS services is free to anybody world-wide without restrictions. It allows the user to search the literature by author, title, and ab...

Digital libraries such as the NASA Astrophysics Data System (Kurtz et al., 2005) permit the easy accumulation of a new type of bibliometric measure, the number of electronic accesses (“reads”) of individual articles. We explore various aspects of this new measure. We examine the obsolescence function as measured by actual reads and show that it can...