A Python Module to Interact with NASA's ADS that Doesn't Suck™

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

1. 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

2. When you get your API key, save it to a file called ~/.ads/dev_key or save it as an environment variable named ADS_DEV_KEY

3. From a terminal type pip install ads (or if you must, use easy_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="citation_count")

>>> 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!

Authors

Vladimir Sudilovsky & Andy Casey, Geert Barentsen, Dan Foreman-Mackey, Miguel de Val-Borro

License

Copyright 2014 the authors

This is open source software available under the MIT License. For details see the LICENSE file.