[task #15896] Query ADS for astrophysics papers and paper metadata

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?15896>

                 Summary: Query ADS for astrophysics papers and paper metadata
                 Project: GNU Astronomy Utilities
            Submitted by: makhlaghi
            Submitted on: Sat 30 Jan 2021 04:02:40 PM UTC
         Should Start On: Sat 30 Jan 2021 12:00:00 AM UTC
   Should be Finished on: Sat 30 Jan 2021 12:00:00 AM UTC
                Category: Query
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Enhancement
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
        Percent Complete: 0%
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                  Effort: 0.00

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Details:

The Astrophysics Data System <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu> (ADS) is the main
archive of papers published in astrophysics (and many other disciplines,
because it also archives many other arXiv disciplines also), providing many
useful metadata on the publications.

Fortunately ADS also has a query API that is accessible via download programs
like cURL: https://github.com/adsabs/adsabs-dev-api

Users just need to register on ADS first, and get a unique "key" (which looks
like an SHA-1 checksum) that is assigned to them. Afterwards, they can
directly use a 'curl' command to search within ADS and download their
necessary paper (or metadata). There are several examples in the '.ipynb'
files of the repository above that we can use to define a high-level interface
for the query.

For the key, we can add an option to Query like '--adskey' to let the user
specify their unique key which we will use to construct the download command.
This option (and its value) can be stored in any of Gnuastro's directory, user
or system configuration files
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Configuration-file-precedence.html>.
Therefore, users don't have to specify it on every call. 

We can add a new set of paper-database specific options for querying paper
databases like ADS (fore example instead of the existing '--database' we can
have '--paper'). 

Here are some possible usages of adding ADS support:

With the command below we can get a list of papers by a certain first-author
to get their precise ADS identifier.


astquery ads --author="^AUTHOR NAME"
 

With the following command, the raw title, author list and abstract of a
desired paper (based on its ADS ID) can be downloaded and displayed on the
terminal as if it was a plain-text file on their computer.


astquery ads --paper=2020arXiv200603018A --abstract


With the following command we can directly download the BibTeX information for
this paper and write/append it into a 'paper.bib' with the other papers that a
user wants to cite in their paper.


astquery ads --paper=2020arXiv200603018A --bibtex >> paper.bib


ADS apparently gives its outputs in JSON format, so it is good to add JSON
support in Gnuastro to easily parse the outputs. I just defined task #15895
for this job.

This task was originally suggested by Javier Moldon and the links above were
found with the help of Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma (from ADS).




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