If you're in research, then you pretty much need NASA's ADS. It's tried, true, and people go crazy on the rare occasions when it goes down.
Getting Started
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You'll need an API key from NASA ADS labs. Sign up for the newest version of ADS search at https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu, visit account settings and generate a new API token. The official documentation is available at https://github.com/adsabs/adsabs-dev-api
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When you get your API key, save it to a file called
~/.ads/dev_keyor save it as an environment variable namedADS_DEV_KEY -
From a terminal type
pip install ads(or if you must, useeasy_install ads)
Happy Hacking!
Examples
You can use this module to search for some popular supernova papers:
>>> import ads
# Opps, I forgot to follow step 2 in "Getting Started"
>>> ads.config.token = 'my token'
>>> papers = ads.SearchQuery(q="supernova", sort="citations")
>>> for paper in papers:
>>> print(paper.title)
...:
[u'Maps of Dust Infrared Emission for Use in Estimation of Reddening and Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Foregrounds']
[u'Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae']
[u'Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant']
[u'First-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters']
[u'Abundances of the elements: Meteoritic and solar']
Or search for papers first-authored by someone:
>>> people = list(ads.SearchQuery(first_author="Reiss, A"))
>>> people[0].author
[u'Reiss, A. W.']
Or papers where they are anywhere in the author list:
>>> papers = list(ads.SearchQuery(author="Reiss, A"))
>>> papers[0].author
[u'Goodwin, F. E.', u'Henderson, D. M.', u'Reiss, A.', u'Wilkerson, John L.']
Or search by affiliation:
>>> papers = list(ads.SearchQuery(aff="*stromlo*"))
>>> papers[0].aff
[u'University of California, Berkeley',
u'University of Kansas',
u'Royal Greenwich Observatory',
u"Queen's University",
u'Mt. Stromlo Observatory',
u'University of Durham']
In the above examples we list() the results from ads.SearchQuery because ads.SearchQuery is a generator, allowing us to return any number of articles.
To prevent deep pagination of results, a default of max_pages=3 is set.
Feel free to change this, but be aware that each new page fetched will count against your daily API limit.
Each object returned is an ads.Article object, which has a number of very handy attributes and functions:
>>> first_paper = papers[0]
>>> first_paper
<ads.search.Article at 0x7ff1b913dd10>
# Show some brief details about the paper
>>> print first_paper
<Zepf, S. et al. 1994, 1994AAS...185.7506Z>
# You can access attributes of an object in IPython by using the 'tab' button:
>>> first_paper.
first_paper.abstract first_paper.build_citation_tree first_paper.first_author_norm first_paper.keys first_paper.pubdate
first_paper.aff first_paper.build_reference_tree first_paper.id first_paper.keyword first_paper.read_count
first_paper.author first_paper.citation first_paper.identifier first_paper.metrics first_paper.reference
first_paper.bibcode first_paper.citation_count first_paper.issue first_paper.page first_paper.title
first_paper.bibstem first_paper.database first_paper.items first_paper.property first_paper.volume
first_paper.bibtex first_paper.first_author first_paper.iteritems first_paper.pub first_paper.year
Which allows you to easily build complicated queries. Feel free to fork this repository and add your own examples!
Contributors
Dan Foreman-Mackey, Miguel de Val-Borro, Vladimir Sudilovsky
License
Copyright 2014 Andy Casey and contributors
This is open source software available under the MIT License. For details see the LICENSE file.