The main sources of bibliographic data for the astro literature (covering primarily journals) are:

Find out more about them....

• Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts (ARIBIB)
• ADS NASA's Astrophysics Data Service and its alerting service
• Web of Science (Citation Indexes) * licensed by UTL
• HEP (SPIRES High Energy Physics)
• INSPEC * licensed by UTL
• SIMBAD and NED
• arXiv astro-ph electronic preprints
• Level 5

To see more databases relevant to astronomy go to UTL's subject list.

To investigate how often articles in particular journals are cited and various journal impact factors, look at ISI Journal Citation Reports- look at it by subject/ astronomy.

Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts

AAA (print, and its predecessor Astronomischer Jahresbericht) is the most comprehensive bibliographic index available in astronomy, through the first half of 2000. Unfortunately, AAA has ceased production. There is an online version of AAA - ARIBIB.

"The ARIBIB is covering the astronomical literature from ancient epochs until the beginning of the year 2000 rather completely. More recent literature than that contained in Volume 73 of AAA will not be added anymore to the ARIBIB. During the next years, the ARI will, however, be engaged in improving the completeness and the information contents of the ARIBIB with respect to the older literature."

Coverage is from 1880 and even earlier. One useful feature is that you can browse authors' names.

There are, unfortunately, no abstracts in the database- ARIBIB's usefulness is as a comprehensive index to the astronomy and astrophysics literature. There are many items included in ARIBIB that are not in the other sources such as INSPEC and ADS (e.g. some conferences, some periodicals, biographical notes, letters). One astronomer here was enthusiastic about ARIBIB's potential usefulness, stating that many previously unseen references came to light when he did a search on his main research topic.

The print versions of AAA and its predecessors are available in the UofT Astronomy and Astrophysics Library.

ADS
NASA's Astrophysics Data System covers the core astronomy literature and more and one can usually get the full text of the article on the spot- even very old ones. ADS has scanned many journals back to volume one. Recent articles can only be accessed if your institution subscribes to the journals, which UofT does. ADS itself though is "free"- unlike many other indexes, there is no need for your institution to license it.
There is a lot of material that is not included for various reasons. Missing materials include conferences, observatory publications and some journals.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell (even when talking directly to ADS staff) which journals are indexed completely, nor is the time period covered consistent across journals. ADS generally does not abstract material itself; it relies on the data provided to it by various sources, including the journal publishers. ADS is working hard to provide more comprehensive coverage. SIMBAD data (bibliographic and object name synonyms) which is pretty comprehensive, is included in the search algorithm and other object oriented data is included in the sense that one can link to them from various places. An overview article (November 2001) about ADS and a series of more detailed articles about ADS. Go to ADS.

Accessing ADS from home and/or a remote location for UofT users
Because of the nature of UTL's proxy server, when it was implemented it became impossible to access recent journal issues (which are licensed by UTL) through ADS directly, if one was off-campus. (On-campus user ips are recognized by the publishers.) To overcome the problem, ADS was configured into UTL's proxy server. When clicking through on the special ADS link, one is asked for numbers- which will be effective through the whole session.

Info re my-access (from home) and conditions of use.

Web of Science
The Web of Science is an electronic index licensed by UofT which encompasses the Citation indexes with which you are probably familiar, e.g. Science Citation Index. The coverage of the online version is much broader; it has about 2000 more journals than the print or CD-ROM versions. The period covered is from 1945.

I notice that some SERIES are covered, e.g. IAU symposia (but not IAU colloquia).

The original idea behind ISI's Citations indexes was to use an article in hand to find more papers on the same topic by searching for articles that have one or more of the same references. Citation indexes are also used to determine how often a particular article is cited and by whom. (Don't forget though, that an article can be cited in a negative way. One of several drawbacks of using these indexes for assessment purposes.) One can still use Web of Science in those ways of course. But it is also useful as a general searching tool.

Web of Science is easy to use, has a good help system and has lots of extras that other databases don't have such as a list of journals covered, definitions, etc. Details. Go to Web of Science

HEP (SPIRES High Energy Physics)
The High-Energy Physics database has a significant amount of the (published) astro-ph literature. The service includes citation searching from 1974 to the present with significant 'backwards' citations added, particularly to the primary APS journals. Go to HEP.

INSPEC
INSPEC is a broad based scientific and engineering commercial bibliographic database. Up until recently, to get a search done, you would have had to come to me and then pay the online costs. Now, however, it is licensed by UofT and available on UTL's web site for you to search yourself. One big advantage of INSPEC is that it covers the literature peripheral to astronomy and astrophysics (e.g. physics, engineering) which may, nevertheless be important for your particular need. It includes most of the astronomy literature but does not include all conferences or the Annual Reviews. Unfortunately, the search interface is rather cumbersome. Details. Go to INSPEC

SIMBAD
is an object based stellar database which includes basic data, references and catalogue measurements and citations. You can search for a single object by name or coordinates, for a list of named objects, or search using a filter with various criteria. To have a search done you can use CADC (Canadian Astronomy Data Center) or ADS or I would be happy to do it for you.

NED
The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database is similar to SIMBAD but its scope is extragalactic. Go to NED

arXiv astro-ph
arXiv electronic preprints database, astro section is useful. Keep in mind though, that recenct studies indicate that only half of astro preprints appear in arXiv. Remember also that the papers vary widely in the quality controls on them- preprints are NOT yet equivalent to the journal literature, which is refereed. Go to arXiv