Editing Astrophysics Data System (section)

==Indexing==
ADS currently (2005) receives abstracts or tables of contents from almost two hundred journal sources. The service may receive data referring to the same article from multiple sources, and creates one bibliographic reference based on the most accurate data from each source. The common use of [[TeX]] and [[LaTeX]] by almost all scientific journals greatly facilitates the incorporation of bibliographic data into the system in a standardized format, and importing [[HTML]]-coded web-based articles is also simple. ADS utilizes [[Python (programming language)|Python]] and [[Perl]] scripts for importing, processing and standardizing bibliographic data.<ref name="architecture" />

The apparently mundane task of converting author names into a standard ''[[Surname]], Initial'' format is actually one of the more difficult to automate, due to the wide variety of naming conventions around the world and the possibility that a given name such as Davis could be a [[first name]], [[middle name]] or surname. The accurate conversion of names requires a detailed knowledge of the names of authors active in astronomy, and ADS maintains an extensive database of author names, which is also used in searching the database (see below).

For electronic articles, a list of the references given at the end of the article is easily extracted. For scanned articles, reference extraction relies on OCR. The reference database can then be "inverted" to list the citations for each paper in the database. Citation lists have been used in the past to identify popular articles missing from the database; mostly these were from before 1975 and have now been added to the system.