Welcome to the ADS Article Service!

This service provides access to scanned images of articles from astronomical journals which are part of the ADS Abstract Service.

We currently have on-line:

ApJ: v.178 - v.194 (11/72 - 12/74) v.204 - v.230 ( 2/76 - 6/79) v.236 - v.473 ( 2/80 - 12/96) ApJL: v.195 - v.473 ( 1/75 - 12/96) AJ: v.51 - v.112 ( 6/44 - 11/96) A&A: v.192 - v.315 ( 3/88 - 11/96) MNRAS: v.147 - v.271 ( 1970 - 1994) PASP: v.87 - v.109#5 ( 1/75 - 5/97) PASJ: v.27 - v.48 ( 3/75 - 11/96) PASA: v.3 - v.10 ( 1976 - 1993) BaltA: v.1 - v.5#2 ( 1/92 - 6/96) BASI: v.8 - v.23 ( 1980 - 1995) RMxAA: v.1 - v.32#1 ( 1974 - 4/96) CoSka: v.11 - v.24 ( 1983 - 1994)
We are missing a number of journals (both single issues and more extensive sets) which we would like to scan. If you have extra journals which you would be willing to donate, please see the list of what we need at https://ads.harvard.edu/pubs/missing_journals.html

There are currently two different ways to access this service:

From the Abstract Service
From the Journal Query Form for ADS Articles

We are grateful to Dr. Wolfgang Kalkofen, Dr. Ronald Maddalena, Prof. William Press, and Prof. David Latham for their donation of ApJ and ApJ Letter journals.

We are grateful to Prof. David Latham, Brenda Corbin and Dr. Martin Elvis for their donation of AJ journals.

We are grateful to Prof. Fred Whipple, Prof. David Latham and the Royal Astronomical Society for their donation of MNRAS journals, especially the older issues, back to volume 1.

Abstract Service

Full journal articles are linked from the Abstract Service in two ways: through the "G" link under the available items column, and from the Full Journal Article link on the page with the abstract. Both of these options bring up a view of the paper on the screen, embedded GIF images of each journal page which can be paged through by hitting the "next page" link at the bottom of the images, or by hitting the link to the page number within the article.

Other retrieval options from the page containing the screen view include the ability to retrieve plate numbers and the ability to retrieve the abstract. The plate number is the plate number within the whole volume of the journal, and will typically be given in the text of the paper. Plates are not attached to their corresponding articles. Not all papers contain corresponding plates, and not all papers which have plates contain plate #1. Users must read the article to decide if there is a plate associated with a given paper.

There are also additional options given in the page "More Article Retrieval Options".

To send the paper directly to a printer, use the "Print" button listed below the abstract, or below the screen view of the article. The printing options are described below.

Printing the Paper: When an article is selected for printing from the ADS article server, a document with a particular MIME type (application/remote-printing) is returned. By default, your browser will not be configured to take any action on documents of this type, and it will prompt you instead asking what should be done with the article being downloaded. The options available to you are usually to either save the document to a local file or save it in a temporary directory and run a program on it. Either way, you will have to make your choice before the article download commences.

If you find yourself retrieving and printing ADS articles all the time, you may consider setting up your browser so that downloading and printing take place automatically once the article is selected. In order to do this, you will need to map the MIME type of the data returned by our server to the local printing program on your system. This sounds more complicated than it really is: most browsers (including Netscape Navigator and MicroSoft Internet Explorer) provide menus that allow the user to define the application to be run for each given file type. You should find the proper menu for your browser and then create (or modify) the following entry for the content type application/remote-printing:

Description:    Remote Printing
Content-Type:   application/remote-printing
File extension: .prn
Application:    (OS-specific printing application here)

The application to be run when a file of type remote-printing is retrieved should be a procedure that feeds the data downloaded from our server to your local printing command, and in general depends on the operating system of your computer. Some examples of popular operating systems and relative printing applications are:

System V-based UNIX systems (e.g. Solaris 2.x, HPUX): lp -c %s BSD-based UNIX (e.g. Linux, SunOS 4.x): lpr %s Microsoft Windows (3.1, 95, 98, NT): C:\BINPRINT.BAT %s And then you should create the DOS batch file called C:\BINPRINT.BAT and insert the following line in it: COPY/B "%1" PRN: If printing fails for some reason, please see our trouble-shooting section.: lp -c %s
BSD-based UNIX (e.g. Linux, SunOS 4.x): lpr %s Microsoft Windows (3.1, 95, 98, NT): C:\BINPRINT.BAT %s And then you should create the DOS batch file called C:\BINPRINT.BAT and insert the following line in it: COPY/B "%1" PRN: If printing fails for some reason, please see our trouble-shooting section.: lpr %s
Microsoft Windows (3.1, 95, 98, NT): C:\BINPRINT.BAT %s And then you should create the DOS batch file called C:\BINPRINT.BAT and insert the following line in it: COPY/B "%1" PRN: If printing fails for some reason, please see our trouble-shooting section.: C:\BINPRINT.BAT %s
And then you should create the DOS batch file called C:\BINPRINT.BAT and insert the following line in it:
COPY/B "%1" PRN:
If printing fails for some reason, please see our trouble-shooting section.

There are additional options that can be used to view or print documents retrieved from our system, which can be more or less useful depending on your setup. Feel free to send us any comments you may have about any other suggestions you may have on this topic.

Articles are available at different resolutions and for different printer languages. In addition, articles can be emailed or faxed to you. You can set your preferred article retrieval method in the Default Settings Page.

See some trouble-shooting tips below if you are having problems printing.

Default Settings Page:

This page uses WWW cookies to allow users to set some basic preferences for the Abstract Service. Note that this page needs to be reloaded after changing settings in order to see those changes.

On this page, users can select their preferred databases, as well as other window attributes. By default, the astronomy database is used, with tables (for output formatting), using only one window for results.

For retrieving articles, users may choose to get the article through the browser (for printing or saving to file), or through E-mail or fax. The option of faxing the article is currently only available to users in the United States.

The articles can be returned as:

High resolution Postscript Level 2
Low resolution Postscript Level 2
High resolution PDF
Low resolution PDF
Low resolution Postscript Level 1
High resolution PCL
Low resolution PCL
High resolution TIFF
Low resolution TIFF

In order to decide which version of the article you should select for printing, you need to know some information about your printer.

The high resolution versions (600 and 300 dpi) are considerably slower to print than the low resolution versions (200 and 150 dpi), but will give superior results, especially on plots and plates. In addiiton, the high resolution files are larger than the corresponding low resolution pages, and some printers may not have a large enough spooling area or physical memory to handle the higher resolution.

Options for customizing pages returned from the abstract service (font and color) are available, and we keep track of the latest volume read through the table of contents service so that we can return only unread volumes.

Trouble Printing?

If you are having trouble printing articles, please make sure you have checked the following:

Do you have your helper application entries set correctly for the content types application/remote-printing and application/postscript? See details under Printing the Paper above.
If working under Windows95, make sure that the version reported by the system is 4.00.950a or higher. Earlier versions of Windows95 have problems seeing DOS devices that will cause the execution of BINPRINT.BAT to fail. Microsoft offers a free service pack that upgrades earlier versions of Windows95 and fixes the problem. To see what version of Windows you're running, open the "System" icon in the Control Panel folder and look at the settings displayed under "General."
Reload the page. When you change the default settings, then go back to a page which has an article for printing, you need to hit reload so that the changes you have just made take effect.
File type. If you have retrieved an article into a file and can't decipher what kind of file it is (probably the default file name was article_query), it is probably a gzipped postscript file, but gunzip doesn't work unless there is a .gz extension on the file. Try renaming the file to article_query.ps.gz, using gunzip to uncompress it, and then print the resulting uncompressed file.

Document formats: PDF (Portable Document Format) and PostScript are two popular document description languages developed by Adobe Systems. While the PostScript format is suitable both for viewing and printing (on PostScript compatible printers), you will need to install and properly configure a PDF viewer in order to be able to display and print PDF files. While this may sound like a limitation of PDF, the fact that viewers and printer drivers exist for all popular platforms make this a very portable format.

PCL is a lower-level page description language understood by most of the printers available nowadays. The PCL documents produced by our article server abide by the PCL3 language specification as developed by Hewlett Packard. PCL files should successfully print on a variety of both low-end inkjet printers (such as the HP deskjets and compatibles) as well as the higher-end laser printers (such as the HP laserjets 4 a 5 series and compatibles).

PCL Files may be viewed or printed on a non-PCL printer with the freeware from Page Technology Marketing, Inc.

PostScript documents are available in two flavors, PostScript level 1, suitable for old printers supporting only the early PostScript language features, and PostScript level 2, which has become today's standard. Postscript level 1 files should successfully print on all PostsScript printers with enough resources (spooling space and memory). PostScript level 2 files should successfully print on any of the modern printers supporting the Adobe PostScript level 2 language features, but some problems have been observed with print engines that don't use the Adobe PostScript interpreter.

In terms of document size and portability, both PDF and PostScript level 2 documents are to be preferred over the other formats, since we can achieve excellent compression of the article bitmaps by using the two languages' features. PDF files are 20% smaller than their PostScript level 2 counterpart since they allow binary encoding of the data stream. Images stored in PCL files are also internally compressed, but not as efficiently, so if possible you should enable the option to compress the file using gzip when retrieving it. PostScript level 1 files yield the biggest size, and often require large resources of printer memory and spooling space to succesfully print. Because of these limitations, we strongly encourage you to avoid selecting this format if at all possible.

Retrieve abstract for article: Selecting this option will submit a query to the abstract service and return all the information contained in the abstract database about this paper, including most of the following: title, authors, author affiliations, journal reference, publication date, category, keywords, bibliographic code, and abstract. Not all articles will contain all items because data from some sources do not include some items. For example, references which we obtain from SIMBAD or from the ApJ publishers do not include the abstract.

Journal Query Form

To access the articles from the Journal Query Form, select the journal, enter the volume number, and enter either the page or plate number of the article desired. If users do not know these values, use the ADS Abstract Service to query by author, object name, etc., or the Table of Contents form to query by journal name, publication date or volume number.

Options from this page include:

We currently have on-line:

Additional Options for On-line Articles

In addition to accessing the articles directly through the Abstract Service and the Journal Query Form there are additional options available from the "More Article Retrieval Options" page.

This page allows users to choose between retrieving an entire article, or a single page of an article. In addition, users are asked to choose where to send the results and to choose an output format for the results:

Send data to viewer: This brings up the articles in a viewer such as ghostview (for PostScript files) or xv (for TIFF files).
Send data direct to printer: This option should typically be used only with PCL or PostScript files. See the help section on printing for more information about configuring your browser to make this option work.
Save file to local disk: This allows users to save the file for viewing or printing locally.

600 dpi Level 2 Postscript: This format is for printing on Level 2 PostScript printers or for viewing with a display PostScript program such as gv and ghostview, (UNIX), or gsview (MS-Windows).
200 dpi Level 2 Postscript: This format is for printing on Level 2 PostScript printers or for viewing with a display PostScript program such as gv and ghostview, (UNIX), or gsview (MS-Windows).
600 dpi PDF: This format is for viewing with a PDF viewer such as Acrobar Reader (all platforms), gv and xpdf (UNIX), or gsview (MS-Windows).
200 dpi PDF: This format is for viewing with a PDF viewer such as Acrobar Reader (all platforms), gv and xpdf (UNIX), or gsview (MS-Windows).
200 dpi Level 1 Postscript: This format is for printing on Level 1 PostScript printers or for viewing with a display PostScript program such as gv and ghostview, (UNIX), or gsview (MS-Windows). Please avoid using this format if possible
150 dpi PCL: This format is for printing on PCL printers such as the HP deskjets and compatibles.
300 dpi PCL: This format is for printing on PCL printers such as the HP deskjets and compatibles.
600 dpi tiff, g4 compressed: This format is for viewing with a TIFF viewer such as xv.
200 dpi tiff, g4 compressed: This format is for viewing with a TIFF viewer such as xv.

Fax article: This option should be used to send a 200 dpi copy of the article to a fax anywhere in the United States.

Also available from this page are "Get" buttons to retrieve the abstract of this article, or to view an embedded gif of the paper on the screen.

If you wish to acknowledge us in a publication, kindly use a phrase such as the following: "This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service." Thanks!