The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a resource that provides astronomical data to the scientific user community. At present the main emphasis is on the Abstract Service, which includes three sets of abstracts:
The abstracts contain information on papers published in a number of refereed scientific publications. This should not be confused with databases that contain information derived from publications such as redshift or luminosity. Each dataset can be searched by author, object name, title, or abstract text words. In addition, the abstracts include links to scanned images of over 20,000 journal articles appearing in `Astronomy and Astrophysics', `ApJL' and `AJ' since 1975, `ApJ' since 1990, and `PASP' since 1988.
In addition to the Abstract Service, the ADS provides access or pointers to NASA data catalogues and data archives, thereby making data collected by NASA missions available to astronomers.
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