Günther Eichhorn

E-prints and journal articles in astronomy : a productive co-existence

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 the NASA Astrophysics Data System drops to zero. This suggests that most astronomers have access to institutional subscriptions and that they choose to read the journal article. In other words, the e‐prints have not undermined journal use in this community and thus currently do not pose a financial threat to publishers. Furthermore, we show that the half‐life (the point at which the use of an article drops to half the use of a newly published article) for an e‐print is shorter than for a journal paper.

The Development of the Astronomy Digital Library

The Astronomy Digital Library provides access to astronomical literature and to on-line data. The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the literature search system and archive in this library. It is a NASAfunded project and access to all the ADS services is free to everybody world-wide. The ADS Abstract Service allows the searching of four databases with abstracts in Astronomy, Instrumentation, Physics/Geophysics, and the ArXiv Preprints with a total of over 2.9 million references. The system also provides access to reference and citation information, links to on-line data, electronic journal articles, and other on-line information. The ADS Article Service contains the full articles for most of the astronomical literature back to Volume 1. It contains the scanned pages of all the major journals (Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Solar Physics), as well as most smaller journals back to Volume 1. There are now 10 mirror sites of the ADS available in different parts of the world to improve connectivity. The ADS can be accessed through any web browser without signup or login at: http://ads.harvard.edu/.

Automated Resolution of Noisy Bibliographic References

We describe a system used by the NASA Astrophysics Data System to identify bibliographic references obtained from scanned article pages by OCR methods with records in a bibliographic database. We analyze the process generating the noisy references and conclude that the three-step procedure of correcting the OCR results, parsing the corrected string and matching it against the database provides unsatisfactory results. Instead, we propose a method that allows a controlled merging of correction, parsing and matching, inspired by dependency grammars. We also report on the effectiveness of various heuristics that we have employed to improve recall.