AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 13. Data Discovery Tools and Services
Display, Wednesday, January 6, 1999, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[13.11] ADS on WWW: Doubling Yearly for Five Years

M.J. Kurtz, G. Eichhorn, A. Accomazzi, C.S. Grant, S.S. Murray (SAO)

It is now five years since the NASA ADS Abstract Service became available on the World Wide Web, in late winter of 1994. Following the explosive growth of the service (when compared with the old propriatory network access system) in the early months of WWW service, ADS growth has settled to doubling yearly.

Currently ADS users make 440,000 queries per month, and receive 8,000,000 bibliographic references and 70,000 full-text articles, as well as abstracts, citation histories, links to data, and links to other data centers. Of the 70,000 full-text articles accessed through ADS each month, already 30% are via pointers to the electronic journals. This number is certain to increase.

It is difficult to determine the exact number of ADS users. We track usage by the number of unique ``cookies'' which access ADS, and by the number of unique IP addresses. There are difficulties with each technique. In addition many non-astronomers find ADS through portal sites like Yahoo, which skews the statistics. 10,000 unique cookies access the full-text articles each month, 17,000 make queries, and 30,000 visit the site. 91% of full-text users have cookies, but only 65% of site visitors.

From another perspective the number of IP addresses from a single typical research site (STScI) which access the full-text data is within 5% of the number of unique cookies assiociated with full-text use from stsci.edu, and also within 5% of the number of AAS members listing an STScI address. The number of unique IP addresses from STScI which make any sort of query to ADS is 40% higher than this. Those who access the full-text average one article per day, those who make queries average two per day. We believe nearly all active astronomy researchers, as well as students and affiliated professionals use ADS on a regular basis.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

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