NASA ADS?

[meyer User]

Hi all,

I am new to Referencer, and plug-in programming as well. I hope this is
not an inappropriate forum to ask, but has anyone looked into getting
meta-data from ADS? I am an astrophysicist, so ArxiV does have a lot of
the papers I read, but I have 3 reasons for preferring ADS for my
papers:

1) Quality - Arxiv frequently has only a pre-print instead of the
published paper.

2) Diversity - You can find conference abstracts and other types of
articles besides published papers, plus I believe the diversity of
journals is much larger.

3) Metadata appears to be more complete, plus useful things like
abstracts and also-referenced. (and keywords!! would be useful)

Right now, if I downloaded the paper originally from ADS, referencer
does not find any metadata for it.

I am a scientific programmer (C, Perl, Fortran), but I would be willing
to learn and write a plugin that deals with ADS if anyone can tell me if
that is possible. I have not seen anything mentioned on the archive of
this mailing list so far.

Here is an example of an article page:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ApJ...677..906F

Again, I know little about this so I apologize if this is an
inappropriate place to ask.

Eileen

[John Spray]

There is an incomplete ADS plugin. I wrote it a while back to resolve
DOIs to the ADS XML format. However, I found that the XML output from
ADS has the problem that the <journal> field is full of other things.
For example, in [1] it's <journal>Journal of Applied Physics, Volume 89,
Issue 11, pp. 7269-7271 (2001).</journal>.

Two possible fixes to this:
* Pull the bibtex instead of the XML. In this case journals are
provided as \apj style macros -- it would be necessary to import
a lookup table for these into referencer.
* Have ADS general something else: the "Preferred format..." link
on article pages is a link like [2]. If a custom format string
could be derived that gives us the information we want in the
form that we want it, then the plugin would probably be more
robust. I have no idea how to write those format strings
though.
* Find out if this weird <journal> output is what ADS really
intends, or if this is a bug they can fix on their end.

As you've noticed, the plugin isn't included in the release. It can be
found in the referencer mercurial repository:
http://hg.icculus.org/jcspray/referencer/file/tip/plugins/ads.py

Happy hacking.

Cheers,
John


1. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?doi=10.1063%2F1.1358829&data_type=XML

2. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?bibcode=2001JAP....89.7269N&data_type=Custom&format=%5C%5Cbibitem%5B%25%5C2m%25%28y%29%5D%25%7BR%7D%20%25%5C8l%20%25%5CY,%25%5Cj,%25%5CV,%25%5Cp%5Cn&return_fmt=LONG&db_key=PHY&nocookieset=1