With the deprecation of the classic SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) search interface, I wanted to improve my workflow for searching for papers in the astronomy literature. I find that I generally just want to do author based searches with possible year constraints so I made this Workflow that can be used by Alfred (tested in versions 3 and 4) to make this fast and easy.

First you'll need to get Alfred and buy the Powerpack. Then you can download the adsabs.workflow file from the Releases page. Double click to import that into Alfred.

You can also install the development version of the workflow by cloning this repository into the ~/Library/Application Support/Alfred/Alfred.alfredpreferences/workflows directory.

To get all the features out of this worflow, you should also install Andy Casey's ads library. Then you can either put your API key in the ~/.ads/dev_key file or set it using the ADS_API_KEY variable in the workflow interface.

By default Alfred uses the system Python, but you can change that by putting the path to your favorite Python executable in the ADS_PYTHON variable.

To get started you can just open Alfred and type ads to start searching. This workflow is designed to search authors and years only. For example, if you want to search for papers by an author named "Spergel" in 2015, you can execute:

ads spergel 2015

If you only want to search for the first author, use:

ads ^spergel 2015

You can list multiple authors, if you want:

ads ^mandel agol 2002

Or year ranges:

ads ^mandel agol 2000 2004

And you can include first names, initials, etc. using quotes:

ads "^mandel, k" "agol, e" 2000 2004

If you run into any problems, please report the issue on GitHub.

Copyright 2019 Dan Foreman-Mackey.

This is free software made available under the MIT License. For details see the LICENSE file.