Help on the Bibliographic Code Query Program

The program bib_query is available for users to directly retrieve abstracts from the ADS Abstract Service by bibliographic code. bib_query may be used to link directly to our abstracts from outside of the Abstract Service. For example, authors may wish to use this on home pages, curriculum vitae, or on-line reprints.

bib_query queries the datasets for the abstract requested. The argument &db_key defaults to the astronomy database (AST), but may be specified as AST, PHY, INST, or ALL (e.g. &db_key=ALL). Full journal information, including abstract, authors, keywords, etc. is returned for the bibliographic code if it is in the system. If there is no entry in the database specified for the entered bibliographic code, an error message is returned.

bib_query will also seach for partial bibcodes. For example, searching for 198?ApJ..????L will find all ApJL articles from the 1980's. In addition, there are several special translations which allow searching for MNRAS special pages. This allows querying for MNRAS (just the regular articles), MNRASA (all articles in MNRAS, including pink pages and letters), MNRASL (only letters), and MNRASP (only pink pages)

The program is located in the directory:

     https://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin

It requires an input bibliographic code as an argument, delimited with a "?". For example, to link to the ApJ paper by Gundersen from volume 443, p. L57, the following URL would be used:

     https://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1995ApJ...443L..57G

Note that if the bibliographic code contains an ampersand (&), it should be escaped with the html sequence "%26" in order to be properly translated. While this is not necessary with all browsers, it is certainly a good idea.

More information about the ADS project is available here, or you can send e-mail to ads@cfa.harvard.edu