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# Chemistry in the Envelopes around Massive Young Stars

## 1. Introduction

Massive star-forming regions have traditionally been prime targets for astrochemistry owing to their bright molecular lines (e.g., Johansson et al. 1984, Cummins et al. 1986, Irvine et al. 1987, Ohishi 1997). Massive young stellar objects (YSOs) have luminosities of $`10^410^6`$ L and involve young O- and B-type stars. Because their formation proceeds more rapidly than that of low-mass stars and involves ionizing radiation, substantial chemical differences may be expected. The formation of high mass stars is much less well understood than that of low-mass stars. For example, observational phenomena such as ultracompact H II regions, hot cores, masers and outflows have not yet been linked into a single evolutionary picture. Chemistry may well be an important diagnostic tool in establishing such a sequence.

Most of the early work on massive star-forming regions has centered on two sources, Orion–KL and SgrB2. Numerous line surveys at millimeter (e.g., Blake et al. 1987, Turner 1991) and submillimeter (Jewell et al. 1989, Sutton et al. 1991, 1995, Schilke et al. 1997) wavelengths have led to an extensive inventory of molecules through identification of thousands of lines. In addition, the surveys have shown strong chemical variations between different sources.

In recent years, new observational tools have allowed a more detailed and systematic study of the envelopes of massive YSOs. Submillimeter observations routinely sample smaller beams (typically 15′′ vs. 30′′–1 ) and higher critical densities ($`10^6`$ vs. $`10^4`$ cm-3) than the earlier work. Moreover, interferometers at 3 and 1 millimeter provide maps with resolutions of $`0.5^{\prime \prime }`$–5′′. Finally, ground- and space-based infrared observations allow both the gas and the ices to be sampled (e.g., Evans et al. 1991, van Dishoeck et al. 1999). These observational developments have led to a revival of the study of massive star formation within the last few years. Recent overviews of the physical aspects of high-mass star formation are found in Churchwell (1999) and Garay & Lizano (1999).

In this brief review, we will first summarize available observational diagnostics to study the different phases and physical components associated with massive star formation. Subsequently, an overview of recent results on intermediate mass YSOs is given, which are often better characterized than their high-mass counterparts because of their closer distance. Subsequently, we will discuss a specific sample of embedded massive YSOs which have been studied through a combination of infrared and submillimeter data. After illustrating the modeling techniques, we address the question how the observed chemical variations are related to evolutionary effects, different conditions in the envelope (e.g., $`T`$, mass) or different luminosities of the YSOs. More extensive overviews of the chemical evolution of star-forming regions are given by van Dishoeck & Blake (1998), Hartquist et al. (1998), van Dishoeck & Hogerheijde (1999) and Langer et al. (2000). Schilke et al. (this volume) present high spatial resolution interferometer studies, whereas Macdonald & Thompson (this volume) focus on submillimeter data of hot core/ultracompact H II regions. Ices are discussed by Ehrenfreund & Schutte (this volume).

## 2. Submillimeter and Infrared Diagnostics

The majority of molecules are detected at (sub-)millimeter wavelengths, and line surveys highlight the large variations in chemical composition between different YSOs, both within the same parent molecular cloud and between different clouds. The recent 1–3 mm surveys of Sgr B2 (Nummelin et al. 1998, Ohishi & Kaifu 1999) dramatically illustrate the strong variations between various positions (see Figure 1). The North position is typical of ‘hot core’-type spectra, which are rich in lines of saturated organic molecules. This position has also been named the ‘large molecule heimat’ (e.g., Kuan & Snyder 1994, Liu & Snyder 1999). The Middle position has strong SO and SO2 lines, whereas the Northwest position has a less-crowded spectrum with lines of ions and long carbon chains. A similar differentiation has been observed for three positions in the W 3 giant molecular cloud by Helmich & van Dishoeck (1997), who suggested an evolutionary sequence based on the chemistry.

The availability of complete infrared spectra from 2.4–200 $`\mu `$m with the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) allows complementary variations in infrared features to be studied. Figure 2 shows an example of ISO–SWS and LWS spectra of two objects: Cep A ($`L2.4\times 10^4`$ L) and S 106 ($`L4.2\times 10^4`$ L). The Cep A spectrum is characteristic of the deeply embedded phase, in which the silicates and ices in the cold envelope are seen in absorption. The S 106 spectrum is typical of a more evolved massive YSO, with strong atomic and ionic lines in emission and prominent PAH features. A similar sequence has been shown by Ehrenfreund et al. (1998) for a set of southern massive young stars with luminosities up to $`4\times 10^5`$ L.

The most successful models for explaining these different chemical characteristics involve accretion of species in an icy mantle during the (pre-)collapse phase, followed by grain-surface chemistry and evaporation of ices once the YSO has started to heat its surroundings (e.g., Millar 1997). The evaporated molecules subsequently drive a rapid high-temperature gas-phase chemistry for a period of $`10^410^5`$ yr, resulting in complex, saturated organic molecules (e.g., Charnley et al. 1992, 1995; Charnley 1997; Caselli et al. 1993, Viti & Williams 1999). The abundance ratios of species such as CH3OCH3/CH3OH and SO2/H2S show strong variations with time, and may be used as ‘chemical clocks’ for a period of 5000–30,000 yr since evaporation. Once most of the envelope has cleared, the ultraviolet radiation can escape and forms a photon-dominated region (PDR) at the surrounding cloud material, in which molecules are dissociated into radicals (e.g., HCN $``$ CN) and PAH molecules excited to produce infrared emission. The (ultra-)compact H II region gives rise to strong ionic lines due to photoionization.

Table 1 summarizes the chemical characteristics of the various physical components, together with the observational diagnostics at submillimeter and infrared wavelengths. Within the single-dish submillimeter and ISO beams, many of these components are blended together and interferometer observations will be essential to disentangle them. Nevertheless, the single-dish data are useful because they encompass the entire envelope and highlight the dominant component in the beam. Combined with the above chemical scenario, one may then attempt to establish an evolutionary sequence of the sources.

The physical distinction between the ‘hot core’ and the warm inner envelope listed in Table 1 is currently not clear: does the ‘hot core’ represent a separate physical component or is it simply the inner warm envelope at a different stage of chemical evolution? Even from an observational point of view, there appear to be different types of ‘hot cores’: some of them are internally heated by the young star (e.g., W 3(H2O)), whereas others may just be dense clumps of gas heated externally (e.g., the Orion compact ridge). This point will be further discussed in §§4 and 5. Disks are not included in Table 1, because little is known about their chemical characteristics, or even their existence, around high-mass YSOs (see Norris, this volume).

## 3. Intermediate-Mass YSOs

Intermediate-mass pre-main sequence stars, in particular the so-called Herbig Ae/Be stars, have received increased observational attention in recent years (see Waters & Waelkens 1998 for a review). These stars have spectral type A or B and show infrared excesses due to circumstellar dust. Typical luminosities are in the range $`10^210^4`$ L, and several objects have been located within 1 kpc distance. Systematic mapping of CO and the submillimeter continuum of a sample of objects has been performed by Fuente et al. (1998) and Henning et al. (1998). The data show the dispersion of the envelope with time starting from the deeply embedded phase (e.g., LkH$`\alpha `$234) to the intermediate stage of a PDR (e.g., HD 200775 illuminating the reflection nebula NGC 7023) to the more evolved stage where the molecular gas has disappeared completely (e.g., HD 52721). The increasing importance of photodissociation in the chemistry is probed by the increase in the CN/HCN abundance ratio. This ratio has been shown in other high-mass sources to be an excellent tracer of PDRs (e.g., Simon et al. 1997, Jansen et al. 1995). Line surveys of these objects in selected frequency ranges would be useful to investigate their chemical complexity, especially in the embedded phase.

ISO-SWS observations of a large sample of Herbig Ae/Be stars have been performed by van den Ancker et al. (2000b,c). In the embedded phase, shock indicators such as \[S I\] 25.2 $`\mu `$m are strong, whereas in the later phases PDR indicators such as PAHs are prominent. An excellent example of this evolutionary sequence is provided by three Herbig Ae stars in the BD+40o4124 region ($`d1`$ kpc). The data suggest that in the early phases, the heating of the envelope is dominated by shocks, whereas in later phases it is controlled by ultraviolet photons.

ISO-LWS data have been obtained for a similar sample of Herbig Ae/Be stars by Lorenzetti et al. (1999) and Giannini et al. (2000), and are summarized by Saraceno et al. (1999). The \[C II\] 158 $`\mu `$m and \[O I\] 63 and 145 $`\mu `$m lines are prominent in many objects and are due primarily to the PDR component in the large LWS beam ($`80^{\prime \prime }`$). High-$`J`$ CO and OH far-infrared lines have been detected in some objects and indicate the presence of a compact, high temperature and density region of $``$1000 AU in size, presumably tracing the inner warm envelope (see Figure 3). Far-infrared lines of H2O are seen in low-mass YSO spectra, but are weak or absent in those of intermediate- and high-mass YSOs, with the exception of Orion-KL and SgrB2 (e.g., Harwit et al. 1998, Cernicharo et al. 1997, Wright et al. 2000). The absence of H2O lines in higher-mass objects may be partly due to the larger distance of these objects, resulting in substantial dilution in the LWS beam. However, photodissociation of H2O to OH and O by the enhanced ultraviolet radiation may also play a role.

In summary, both the submillimeter and infrared diagnostics reveal an evolutionary sequence from the youngest ‘Group I’ objects to ‘Group III’ objects (cf. classification by Fuente et al. 1998), in which the envelope is gradually dispersed. Such a sequence is analogous to the transition from embedded Class 0/I objects to more evolved Class II/III objects in the case of low-mass stars (Adams et al. 1987). The ISO data provide insight into the relative importance of the heating and removal mechanisms of the envelope. At the early stages of intermediate-mass star formation, shocks due to outflows appear to dominate whereas at later stages radiation is more important.

## 4. Embedded, Infrared-Bright Massive YSOs

### 4.1. Sample

The availability of complete, high quality ISO spectra for a significant sample of massive young stars provides a unique opportunity to study these sources through a combination of infrared and submillimeter spectroscopy, and further develop these diagnostics. Van der Tak et al. (2000a) have selected a set of $``$10 deeply embedded massive YSOs which are bright at mid-infrared wavelengths (12 $`\mu `$m flux $`>`$ 100 Jy), have luminosities of $`10^32\times 10^5`$ L and distances $`d`$4 kpc. The sources are all in an early evolutionary state (comparable to the ‘Class 0/I’ or ‘Group I’ stages of low- and intermediate-mass stars), as indicated by their weak radio continuum emission and absence of ionic lines and PAH features. In addition to ISO spectra, JCMT submillimeter data and OVRO interferometer observations have been obtained. For most of the objects high spectral resolution ground-based infrared data of CO, 13CO and H$`{}_{}{}^{+}{}_{3}{}^{}`$ are available (Mitchell et al. 1990, Geballe & Oka 1996, McCall et al. 1999), and occasionally H2 (Lacy et al. 1994, Kulesa et al. 1999). For comparison, 5 infrared-weak sources with similar luminosities are studied at submillimeter wavelengths only. This latter set includes hot cores and ultracompact H II regions such as W 3(H2O), IRAS 20126+4104 (Cesaroni et al. 1997, 1999), and NGC 6334 IRS1.

### 4.2. Physical structure of the envelope

In order to derive molecular abundances from the observations, a good physical model of the envelope is a prerequisite. Van der Tak et al. (1999, 2000a) outline the techniques used to constrain the temperature and density structure (Figure 4). The total mass within the beam is derived from submillimeter photometry, whereas the size scale of the envelope is constrained from line and continuum maps. The dust opacity has been taken from Ossenkopf & Henning (1994) and yields values for the mass which are consistent with those derived from C17O for warm sources where CO is not depleted onto grains.

The temperature structure of the dust is calculated taking the observed luminosity of the source, given a power-law density structure (see below). At large distances from the star, the temperature follows the optically thin relation $`r^{0.4}`$, whereas at smaller distances the dust becomes optically thick at infrared wavelengths and the temperature increases more steeply (see Figure 5). It is assumed that $`T_{\mathrm{gas}}=T_{\mathrm{dust}}`$, consistent with explicit calculations of the gas and dust temperatures by, e.g., Doty & Neufeld (1997) for these high densities.

The continuum data are sensitive to temperature and column density, but not to density. Observations of a molecule with a large dipole moment are needed to subsequently constrain the density structure. One of the best choices is CS and its isotope C34S, for which lines ranging from $`J`$=2–1 to 10–9 have been observed. Assuming a power-law density profile $`n(r)=n_o(r/r_o)^\alpha `$, values of $`\alpha `$ can be determined from minimizing $`\chi ^2`$ between the CS line data and excitation models. The radiative transfer in the lines is treated through a Monte-Carlo method. The best fit to the data on the infrared-bright sources is obtained for $`\alpha =1.01.5`$, whereas the hot core/compact H II region sample requires higher values, $`\alpha 2`$. This derivation assumes that the CS abundance is constant through the envelope; if it increases with higher temperatures, such as may be the case for hot cores, the values of $`\alpha `$ are lowered. Note that the derived values of $`\alpha =1.01.5`$ are lower than those found for deeply embedded low-mass objects, where $`\alpha 2`$ (e.g., Motte et al. 1998, Hogerheijde et al. 1999).

Figure 5 displays the derived temperature and density structure for the source GL 2591, together with the sizes of the JCMT and OVRO beams. While the submillimeter data are weighted toward the colder, outer envelope, the infrared absorption line observations sample a pencil-beam line of sight toward the YSO and are more sensitive to the inner warm ($`1000`$ K) region. On these small scales, the envelope structure deviates from a radial power law, which decreases the optical depth at near-infrared wavelengths by a factor of $`3`$ (van der Tak et al. 1999).

For sources for which interferometer data are available, unresolved compact continuum emission is detected on scales of a few thousand AU or less. This emission is clearly enhanced compared with that expected from the inner “tip” of the power-law envelope, and its spectral index indicates optically thick warm dust, most likely in a dense circumstellar shell or disk. The presence of this shell or disk is also indicated by the prevalence of blue-shifted outflowing dense gas without a red-shifted counterpart on $`<10^{\prime \prime }`$ scales.

### 4.3. Chemical structure: infrared absorption lines

The ISO-SWS spectra of the infrared-bright sources show absorption by various gas-phase molecules, in addition to strong features by ices. Molecules such as CO2 (van Dishoeck et al. 1996, Boonman et al. 1999, 2000a), H2O (van Dishoeck & Helmich 1996, Boonman et al. 2000b), CH4 (Boogert et al. 1998), HCN and C2H2 (Lahuis & van Dishoeck 2000) have been detected (see also van Dishoeck 1998, Dartois et al. 1998).

In the infrared, absorption out of all $`J`$-levels is observed in a single spectrum. The excitation temperatures $`T_{\mathrm{ex}}`$ of the various molecules, calculated assuming LTE, range from $`\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{_<}{^{}}100`$ to $`1000`$ K between sources, giving direct information on the physical component in which the molecules reside. While CO is well-mixed throughout the envelopes, H2O, HCN and C2H2 are enhanced at high temperatures. In contrast, CO2 seems to avoid the hottest gas. High spectral resolution ground-based data of HCN and C2H2 by Carr et al. (1995) and Lacy et al. (1989) for a few objects suggest line widths of at most a few km s-1, excluding an origin in outflowing gas.

The abundances of H2O, HCN and C2H2 increase by factors of $`\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{_>}{^{}}10`$ with increasing $`T_{\mathrm{ex}}`$ (see Figure 7). The warm H2O must be limited to a $`\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{_<}{^{}}1000`$ AU region, since the pure rotational lines are generally not detected in the $`80^{\prime \prime }`$ ISO-LWS beam (Wright et al. 1997). For CO2, the abundance variation between sources is less than a factor of 10, and no clear trend with $`T_{\mathrm{ex}}`$ is found. For the same sources, the H2O and CO2 ice abundances show a decrease by an order of magnitude, consistent with evaporation of the ices. However, the gas-phase H2O and CO2 abundances are factors of $`10`$ lower than expected if all evaporated molecules stayed in the gas phase, indicating that significant chemical processing occurs after evaporation. More detailed modeling using the source structures derived from submillimeter data is in progress.

### 4.4. Chemical structure: submillimeter emission

The JCMT data of the infrared-bright objects show strong lines, but lack the typical crowded ‘hot core’ spectra observed for objects such as W 3(H2O) and NGC 6334 IRS1. Complex organics such as CH3OCH3 and CH3OCHO are detected in some sources (e.g., GL 2591, NGC 7538 IRS1), but are not as prominent as in the comparison sources. Yet warm gas is clearly present in these objects. Is the ‘hot core’ still too small to be picked up by the single dish beams, or are the abundances of these molecules not (yet) enhanced?

To investigate this question, van der Tak et al. (2000b) consider the analysis of two species, H2CO and CH3OH. Both species have many lines throughout the submillimeter originating from low- and high-lying energy levels. Given the physical structure determined in §4.2, abundance profiles can be constrained. Two extreme, but chemically plausible models are considered: (i) a model with a constant abundance throughout the envelope. This model is motivated by the fact that pure gas-phase reaction schemes do not show large variations in calculated abundances between 20 and 100 K; (ii) a model in which the abundance ‘jumps’ to a higher value at the ice evaporation temperature, $`T_d90`$ K. In this model, the abundances in the outer envelope are set at those observed in cold clouds, so that the only free parameter is the amount of abundance increase.

It is found that the H2CO data can be well fit with a constant abundance of a few $`\times 10^9`$ throughout the envelope. However, the high $`J,K`$ data for CH3OH require a jump in its abundance from $`10^9`$ to $`10^7`$ for the warmer sources. This is consistent with the derived excitation temperatures: H2CO has a rather narrow range of $`T_{\mathrm{ex}}`$=50–90 K, whereas CH3OH shows $`T_{\mathrm{ex}}`$=30–200 K. Moreover, the interferometer maps of CH3OH rule out constant abundance models. The jump observed for CH3OH is chemically plausible since this molecule is known to be present in icy grain mantles with abundances of 5–40% with respect to H2O ice, i.e., $`10^710^6`$ w.r.t. H2. Similar increases in the abundances of organic molecules (e.g., CH3OH, C2H3CN, ….) are found with increasing $`T_{\mathrm{dust}}`$ for a set of ‘hot–core’ objects by Ikeda & Ohishi (1999).

### 4.5. Comparison with chemical models

Both the infrared and submillimeter data show increases in the abundances of various molecules with increasing temperature. Four types of species can be distinguished: (i) ‘passive’ molecules which are formed in the gas phase, freeze out onto grains during the cold (pre-)collapse phase and are released during warm-up without chemical modification (e.g., CO, C2H2); (ii) molecules which are formed on the grains during the cold phase by surface reactions and are subsequently released into the warm gas (e.g., CH3OH); (iii) molecules which are formed in the warm gas by gas-phase reactions with evaporated molecules (e.g., CH3OCH3); (iv) molecules which are formed in the hot gas by high temperature reactions (e.g., HCN). These types of molecules are associated with characteristic temperatures of (a) $`T_{\mathrm{dust}}<20`$ K, where CO is frozen out; the presence of CO ice is thought to be essential for the formation of CH3OH; (b) $`T_{\mathrm{dust}}90`$ K, where all ices evaporate on a time scale of $`<10^5`$ yr; and (c) $`T_{\mathrm{gas}}>230`$ K, where gas-phase reactions drive the available atomic oxygen into water through the reactions O + H2 $``$ OH $``$ H2O (Ceccarelli et al. 1996, Charnley 1997). Atomic oxygen is one of the main destroyers of radicals and carbon chains, so that its absence leads to enhanced abundances of species like HCN and HC3N in hot gas.

Water is abundantly formed on the grains, but the fact that the H2O abundance in the hot gas is not as large as that of the ices suggests that H2O is broken down to O and OH after evaporation by reactions with H$`{}_{}{}^{+}{}_{3}{}^{}`$. H2O can subsequently be reformed in warm gas at temperatures above $``$230 K, but Figure 7 indicates that not all available gas-phase oxygen is driven into H2O, as the models suggest. The low abundance of CO2 in the warm gas is still a puzzle, since evaporation of abundant CO2 ice is observed. The molecule must be broken down rapidly in the warm gas, with no reformation through the CO + OH $``$ CO2 reaction (see question by Minh).

### 4.6. Evolution?

The objects studied by van der Tak et al. (2000a) are all in an early stage of evolution, when the young stars are still deeply embedded in their collapsing envelope. Nevertheless, even within this narrow evolutionary range, there is ample evidence for physical and chemical differentiation of the sources. This is clearly traced by the increase in the gas/solid ratios, the increase in abundances of several molecules, the decrease in the ice abundances, and the increase of the amount of crystalline ice with increasing temperature (Boogert et al. 2000a).

The fact that the various indicators involve different characteristic temperatures ranging from $`<`$50 K (evaporation of apolar ices) to 1000 K ($`T_{\mathrm{ex}}`$ of gas-phase molecules) indicates that the heating is not a local effect, but that ‘global warming’ occurs throughout the envelope. Moreover, it cannot be a geometrical line-of-sight effect in the mid-infrared data, since the far–infrared continuum (45/100 $`\mu `$m) and submillimeter line data (CH3OH) show the same trend. Shocks with different filling factors are excluded for the same reason.

Can we relate this ‘global warming’ of the envelope to an evolutionary effect, or is it determined by other factors? The absence of a correlation of the above indicators with luminosity or mass of the source argues against them being the sole controlling factor. The only significant trend is found with the ratio of envelope mass over stellar mass. The physical interpretation of such a relation would be that with time, the envelope is dispersed by the star, resulting in a higher temperature throughout the envelope.

## 5. Outstanding questions and future directions

The results discussed here suggest that the observed chemical abundance and temperature variations can indeed be used to trace the evolution of the sources, and that, as in the case of low- and intermediate-mass stars, the dispersion of the envelope plays a crucial role. The combination of infrared and submillimeter diagnostics is very important in the analysis. An important next step would be to use these diagnostics to probe a much wider range of evolutionary stages for high-mass stars, especially in the hot core and (ultra-)compact H II region stages, to develop a more complete scenario of high-mass star formation. The relation between the inner warm envelope and the ‘hot core’ is still uncertain: several objects have been observed which clearly have hot gas and evaporated ices (including CH3OH) in their inner regions, but which do not show the typical crowded ‘hot core’ submillimeter spectra. Are these objects just on their way to the ‘hot core’ chemical phase? Or is the ‘hot core’ a separate physical component, e.g., a dense shell at the edge of the expanding hyper-compact H II region due to the pressure from the ionized gas, which is still too small to be picked up by the single-dish beams? In either case, time or evolution plays a role and would constrain the ages of the infrared-bright sources to less than a few $`\times 10^4`$ yr since evaporation. Interferometer data provide evidence for the presence of a separate physical component in the inner 1000 AU, but lack the spatial resolution to distinguish a shell from any remnant disk, for example on kinematic grounds.

An important difference between high- and low-mass objects may be the mechanism for the heating and dispersion of their envelopes. For low-mass YSOs, entrainment of material in outflows is the dominant process (Lada 1999). For intermediate-mass stars, outflows are important in the early phase, but ultraviolet radiation becomes dominant in the later stages (see § 3). The situation for high-mass stars is still unclear. The systematic increase in gas/solid ratios and gas-phase abundances point to global heating of the gas and dust, consistent with a radiative mechanism. However, a clear chemical signature of ultraviolet radiation on gas-phase species and ices in the embedded phase has not yet been identified, making it difficult to calibrate its effect. On the other hand, high-mass stars are known to have powerful outflows and winds, but a quantitative comparison between their effectiveness in heating an extended part of the envelope and removing material is still lacking. Geometrical effects are more important in less embedded systems, as is the case for low-mass stars, where the circumstellar disk may shield part of the envelope from heating (Boogert et al. 2000b).

To what extent does the chemical evolution picture also apply to low-mass stars? Many of the chemical processes and characteristics listed in Table 1 are also known to occur for low-mass YSOs, but several important diagnostic tools are still lacking. In particular, sensitive mid-infrared spectroscopy is urgently needed to trace the evolution of the ices for low-mass YSOs and determine gas/solid ratios. Also, molecules as complex as CH3OCH3 and C2H5CN have not yet been detected toward low-mass YSOs, although the limits are not very stringent (e.g., van Dishoeck et al. 1995). Evaporation of ices clearly occurs in low-mass environments as evidenced by enhanced abundances of grain-surface molecules in shocks (e.g., Bachiller & Pérez-Gutiérrez 1997), but whether a similar ‘hot core’ chemistry ensues is not yet known. Differences in the H/H2 ratio and temperature structure in the (pre-)collapse phase may affect the grain-surface chemistry and the ice composition, leading to different abundances of solid CH3OH, which is an essential ingredient for building complex molecules.

Future instrumentation with high spatial resolution ($`<1^{\prime \prime }`$) and high sensitivity will be essential to make progress in our understanding of the earliest phase of massive star formation, in particular the SMA and ALMA at submillimeter wavelengths, and SIRTF, SOFIA, FIRST and ultimately NGST at mid- and far-infrared wavelengths.

#### Acknowledgments.

The authors are grateful to G.A. Blake, A.C.A. Boogert, A.M.S. Boonman, P. Ehrenfreund, N.J. Evans, T. Giannini, F. Lahuis, L.G. Mundy, A. Nummelin, W.A. Schutte, A.G.G.M. Tielens, and M.E. van den Ancker for discussions, collaborations and figures. This work was supported by NWO grant 614.41.003

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## Discussion

M. Ohishi: I agree with the point you mentioned, that the chemical differences among hot cores is due to a difference of evolutionary stage. Now we have several well-known hot cores such as Orion KL/S, W 3 IRS5/H2O/IRS4, SgrB2 N/M/NW etc. Can you give us your personal view on the evolutionary differences of these sources?

E.F. van Dishoeck: Van der Tak et al. (2000a) argue that the infrared-bright objects such as W 3 IRS5 represent an earlier evolutionary phase than the hot cores, on the basis of an anti-correlation with the radio continuum. The physical picture is that the ionizing UV radiation and stellar winds push the hottest dust in the inner regions further out, decreasing the temperature of the dust and thus the near-infrared continuum. At the same time, the size of the region which can be ionized is increased. The ‘erosion’ of the envelopes thus occurs from the inside out. For other sources, infrared diagnostics are lacking, so that the situation is less clear. It would be great if chemistry could help to tie down the time scales of the various phases.

W. Irvine: How do you interpret the behavior of the PAH features as a function of evolutionary stage in the sources that you discussed?

E.F. van Dishoeck: The absence of PAH features in the early embedded stage can be due either to a lack of ultraviolet radiation to excite the features or to an absence of the carriers. Manske & Henning (1999, A&A 349, 907) have argued for the case of Herbig Ae/Be stars that there should be sufficient radiation to excite PAHs in the envelope/disk system, so that the lack is likely due to the absence of the PAHs themselves. Perhaps the PAHs have accreted into the icy mantles at the high densities in the inner envelope and do not evaporate and/or are chemically transformed into other more refractory species on grains. Alternatively, the region producing ultraviolet radiation (H II region) may be very small in these massive objects, and the photons may not reach the PAH-rich material or have a very small beam filling factor. Once the envelope breaks up and ultraviolet radiation can escape to the less dense outer envelope, the PAH features from those regions will appear in spectra taken with large beams.

T. Geballe: You said that there is little evidence of the effect of ultraviolet radiation on solid-state chemistry. Isn’t the 4.6 $`\mu `$m XCN feature a good example of that influence?

E.F. van Dishoeck: The ‘XCN’ feature is indeed the best candidate for tracing the ultraviolet processing of ices. If ascribed to OCN-, it likely involves HNCO as a precursor. In the laboratory, HNCO is produced by photochemical reactions of CO and NH3, but in the interstellar medium grain surface chemistry is an alternative possibility which does not necessarily involve ultraviolet radiation (see Ehrenfreund & Schutte, this volume).

Y.C. Minh: Do you have an explanation of the low and constant abundances of CO2 in the gas phase?

E.F. van Dishoeck: Charnley & Kaufman (2000, ApJ, 529, L111) argue that the evaporated CO2 is destroyed by reactions with atomic hydrogen at high temperatures in shocks. This is an interesting suggestion, but needs to be tested against other species such as H2O and H2S which can be destroyed by reactions with atomic hydrogen as well. Also, the amount of material in the envelope that can be affected by shocks is not clear.


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# The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Overview

## 1  Introduction

The NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service (hereafter ADS, except in section 2) is now a central facility of bibliographic research in astronomy. In a typical month (March 1999) it is used by more than 20,000 individuals, who make $``$ 580,000 queries, retrieve $``$ 10,000,000 bibliographic entries, read $``$ 400,000 abstracts and $``$ 110,000 articles, consisting of $``$ 1,100,000 pages. The ADS is a key element in the emerging digital information resource for astronomy, which has been dubbed Urania (Boyce (1996)). The ADS is tightly interconnected with the major journals of astronomy, and the major data centers.

The present paper serves as an introduction to the system, a description of its history, current status, use, capabilities, and goals. Detailed descriptions of the ADS system are in the companion papers: The design and use of the search engine is in Eichhorn, et al. (1999); hereafter SEARCH. The architecture, indexing system, and mirror maintenance is in Accomazzi, et al., (1999); hereafter ARCHITECTURE. Finally the methods we use to maintain and update the data base, and to maintain communication with our collaborating data centers and journals (primarily via bibcodes, Schmitz et al. (1995)) is in Grant, et al. (1999); hereafter DATA.

In section 2 we discuss the history of the ADS, paying particular note of the persons and events which were most important to its development. Section 3 briefly discusses the current status of the system, the data it contains, and the hardware, software, and organizational methods we use to maintain and distribute these data. Urania, and especially the ADS role in it, is discussed in section 4. The current capabilities and use of the system are shown in section 5; with section 5.1 showing example queries, and section 5.2 showing how ADS use has changed over time. In section 6 we show how current use varies as a function of the age of an article and the journal it was published in; in 6.1 we develop a multi-component model which accurately describes the whole pattern of article use as a function of age; in 6.2 we compare the similarities and differences of readership information with citation histories; in 6.3 we examine several aspects of the readership pattern for the major journals. Finally, in 7, we estimate the impact of the ADS on astronomy.

## 2  Historical Introduction

The ADS Abstract Service had its beginnings at the conference Astronomy from Large Data-bases, held in Garching in 1987. There Adorf & Busch (1988) discussed the desirability of building a natural language interface to a set of astronomical abstracts (Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts (A&AA) was the model) using software from Information Access Systems, Inc. (IAS; E. Busch was the president of IAS). Watson (1988) discussed the existing abstract services. At this meeting G. Shaw (who was representing IAS) saw the paper by Kurtz (1988), and noticed that the vector space classification methods developed by M. J. Kurtz for the numerical classification of stellar spectra were very similar to those developed by P. G. Ossorio (1966) for the classification (and thus natural language indexing) of text. Ossorio’s methods were the basis of the proposal by Adorf & Busch (1988); Ossorio was the founder of IAS. Shaw suggested Ossorio and Kurtz meet. Also at this conference Squibb & Cheung (1988) presented the NASA plan for an astrophysics data system, and Shaw met G. Squibb.

This meeting of Kurtz and Ossorio took place in January 1988, in Boulder, CO. By the end of the meeting it was clear that the technical difficulties involved in creating an abstract service with a natural language index could be overcome, if the data could become available. A preliminary mathematical solution to the problem was developed, under the assumption that A&AA would be the source of the abstracts. This technique was later called the “statistical Factor Space”, factor analysis being one of the tools used to create the vector space.

Over the next year NASA moved to implement the Squibb & Cheung (1988) plan for the establishment of a network based, distributed system for access and management of NASA astrophysics data holdings, the Astrophysics Data System. Shaw and Ossorio founded a new company, Ellery Systems, Inc., which obtained the systems integration contract for the ADS. During this time Shaw, Ossorio, Kurtz, and S.S. Murray all spoke often about the abstract service as an integral part of the emerging ADS system, and the abstract service, and Factor Space, became nearly synonymous with the ADS project. No actual work was done to implement the abstract service during this time, Ossorio and Kurtz worked on applying their vector space classification techniques to galaxy morphologies (Ossorio & Kurtz (1989), Kurtz, Mussio & Ossorio (1990)), while Murray used the original, non-statistical, Factor Space methods of Ossorio (1966) to build a small ($``$40 documents) natural language indexing system for demonstration purposes.

During the next three years the ADS was built (Good (1992)), but without a literature retrieval service, which was listed as a future development. No NASA funds were devoted to the abstract service during this time. Independently Kurtz and Watson set out to obtain the data necessary to build a prototype system; keyword data was received from the IAU (International Astronomical Union) Thesaurus project (Shobbrook & Shobbrook (1992), Shobbrook & Shobbrook (1993)), and from the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) branch (Pinelli (1990)). A breakthrough occurred in mid 1990 when the Astronomische Rechen Institut graciously provided Watson with magnetic tape copies of the two 1989 volumes of Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts. By the end of 1990 Kurtz (1991, 1992) had built a prototype abstract retrieval system, based on the statistical Factor Space.

In April, 1991 F. Giovane and C. Pilachowski organized a meeting near Washington, D.C. on “On-Line Literature in Astronomy.” At this meeting Boyce (1991) discussed the desire of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to publish on-line journals, Kurtz (1991) discussed the prototype system, and pointed out the types of queries which would be made possible if a natural language abstract system were combined with the Strasbourg Data Centers’s (CDS) SIMBAD (Egret & Wenger (1988)) database and with the Institute for Scientific Information’s Science Citation Index (Garfield (1979)), and van Steenberg (1991) discussed the desire of the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) to create a database of scanned bitmaps of journal articles. Also at this meeting were representatives of NASA’s STI branch, who indicated that they would be willing to provide the abstracts from the STI (often called NASA RECON) abstracts database (Wente (1990)).

Near the end of the meeting Murray (1991) outlined the possibilities inherent in the previous talks. He described a networked data system where a natural language query system for the STI abstracts would work jointly with the CDS/SIMBAD object name index to point astronomers to relevant abstracts, article bitmaps, and electronic journal articles. Save that the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee (1994)) has taken the place of the proprietary network software created for the ADS project by Ellery Systems Inc., and that the ADS has taken over responsibility for the bitmaps from the NSSDC, the current system is essentially identical to the one predicted by Murray (1991).

Following the meeting the NSSDC group (Warnock et al. (1993)) organized the STELAR project, which held a series of meetings where many of the issues involved in electronic journals were discussed, and a consensus was reached on allowed uses of copyrighted journal article bitmaps.

In the spring of 1992 Murray took over the direct management of the ADS project; G. Eichhorn was hired as project manager. The decision was made to proceed forthwith with the development of an abstract service based on the STI abstracts. Because the STI abstract system is differently structured than the A&AA system the statistical Factor Space was abandoned in favor of a more traditional entropy matching technique (Salton and McGill (1983), see SEARCH).

The new system was working with a static database by fall, and was shown at the Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems II meeting in Boston (Kurtz et al. (1993)). The production system was released in February 1993, as part of the package of ADS services, still part of the proprietary ADS network system. Abstract Service use quickly became more than half of all ADS use.

By summer 1993 a connection had been made between the ADS and SIMBAD, permitting users to combine natural language subject matter queries with astronomical object name queries (Grant, Kurtz & Eichhorn (1994)). This connection was enabled by the use of the bibcode (see DATA). We believe this is the first time an internet connection was made to permit the routine, simultaneous, real-time interrogation of transatlanticly separated scientific databases.

By early 1994 The World Wide Web (Berners-Lee (1994)) had matured to where it was possible to make the ADS Abstract Service available via a web forms interface; this was released in February. Within five weeks of the initial WWW release use of the Abstract Service quadrupled (from 400 to 1600 users per month).

By the end of 1994 the ADS project had again been restructured, leaving primarily the WWW based Abstract Service as its principle service. Also the STELAR project at NSSDC ended, and the ADS took over responsibility for creating the database of bitmaps.

The first full article bitmaps, which were of Astrophysical Journal Letters articles, were put on-line in December 1994 (Eichhorn et al. (1994)). By the summer of 1995 the bitmaps were current and complete going back ten years. At that time the Electronic ApJ Letters (Boyce (1995)) went on-line. ¿From the start the ADS indexed the EApJL, and pointed to the electronic version. Also from the beginning the reference section of the EApJL pointed (via WWW hyperlinks) to the ADS abstracts for articles referenced in the articles; again this was enabled by the use of the bibcode.

Also during this time the NASA STI branch became unable to provide abstracts of the journal articles in astronomy. In order to continue the abstract service cooperative arrangements were made with nearly every astronomical research journal, as well as a number of other sources of bibliographic information. DATA describes these arrangements in detail.

The next year (1996) saw nearly every astronomy journal which had not already joined into collaboration with ADS join. Also in 1996 the American Astronomical Society purchased the right to use a subset of the Science Citation Index, and gave these data to ADS (Kurtz et al. (1996)).

## 3  The Current System

Currently the ADS system consists of four semi-autonomous (to the user) abstract services covering Astronomy, Instrumentation, Physics, and Astronomy Preprints. Combined there are nearly 1.5 million abstracts and bibliographic references in the system. The Astronomy Service is by far the most advanced, and accounts for $`85`$% of all ADS use; it ought be noted, however, that the Instrumentation Service contains more abstracts than Astronomy, and a subset of that service is used by the Society of Photo-Optical Industrial Engineers as the basis of the official SPIE publications web site.

All of what follows will refer only to the Astronomy service.

### 3.1 Data

Here is a brief overview of the data in the ADS system, a complete description is in DATA.

#### 3.1.1 Abstracts

The ADS began with the abstracts from the NASA STI database, in printed form these abstracts were the union of the International Aerospace Abstracts and the NASA Scientific and Technical Abstracts and Reports (NASA STAR). While the STI branch has had to substantially cut back on their abstracting of the journal literature, we still get abstracts of NASA reports and other materials from them.

We now receive basic bibliographic information (title, author, page number) from essentially every journal of astronomy. Most also send us abstracts, and some cannot send abstracts, but allow us to scan their journals, and we build abstracts through optical character recognition. Finally we receive some abstracts from the editors of conference proceedings, and from individual authors.

The are $``$500,000 different astronomy articles indexed in the ADS, the database is nearly complete for the major journals articles beginning in 1975.

#### 3.1.2 Bitmaps

The ADS has obtained permission to scan, and make freely available on-line, page images of the back issues of nearly all of the major journals of astronomy. In most cases the bitmaps of current articles are put on-line after a waiting period, to protect the financial integrity of the journal. DATA describes the current status of these efforts.

We plan to provide for each collaborating journal, in perpetuity, a database of page images (bitmaps) from volume 1 page 1 to the first issue which the journal considers to be fully on-line as published. This will provide (along with the indexing and the more recent archives held by the journals) a complete electronic digital library of the major literature in astronomy.

On a longer term we plan to scan old observatory reports, and defunct journals, to finally have a full historical collection on-line. This work is beginning with a collaboration with the Harvard Preservation Project (Eichhorn et al. (1997); Corbin & Coletti (1995)).

#### 3.1.3 Links

ADS responds to a query with a list of references and a set of hyperlinks showing what data is available for each reference. There are $``$1.73 million hyperlinks in the ADS, of which $``$ 31% are to sources external to the ADS project.

The largest number of external links are to SIMBAD, NED, and the electronic journals. A rapidly growing number, although still small in comparison to the others, are to data tables created by the journals and maintained by the CDS and the ADC at Goddard. SEARCH describes the system of hyperlinks in detail.

#### 3.1.4 Citations and References

The use of citation histories is a well known and effective tool for academic research (Garfield (1979)); their inclusion in the ADS has been planned since the conception of the service. In 1996 the AAS purchased a subset of the Science Citation Index from the Institute for Scientific Information, to be used in the ADS; this was updated in 1998. This subset only contains references which were already in the ADS, thus it is seriously incomplete in referring to articles in the non-astronomical literature. This citation information currently spans January 1982-September 1998.

The electronic journals all have machine readable, web accessible, reference pages. The ADS points to these with a hyperlink where possible. Several publishers allow us to use these to maintain citation histories; we do this using our reference resolver software (see ARCHITECTURE). The same software is also used by some publishers to check the validity of their references, pre-publication.

Additionally we use optical character recognition to create reference and citation lists for the historical literature, after it is scanned (Demleitner, et al. (1999)).

#### 3.1.5 Collaboration with CDS/SIMBAD

The Strasbourg Data Center (CDS) has long maintained several of the most important data services for astronomy (e.g. Jung (1971); Jung, Bischoff, & Ochsenbein (1973); Genova et al. (1998)); access to parts of the CDS data via ADS is a key feature of the ADS.

ADS users are able to make joint queries of the ADS bibliographic database and the CDS/SIMBAD bibliographic data base. When SIMBAD contains information on a object which is referred to in a paper whose reference is returned by ADS then ADS also returns a pointer to the SIMBAD data. When a paper has a data table which is kept on-line at the CDS the ADS returns a pointer to it. The CDS-ADS collaboration is at the heart of Urania (section 4). More recently ADS has entered into a collaboration with the National Extragalactic Database (NED; Helou & Madore (1988), Madore et al. (1992)) which is similar to the SIMBAD portion of the CDS-ADS collaboration.

### 3.2 Search Engine

The basic design assumption behind the search engine, and other user interfaces, is that the user is an expert astronomer. This differs from the majority of information retrieval systems, which assume that the user is a librarian. The default behavior of the system is to return more relevant information, rather than just the most relevant information, assuming that the user can easily separate the wheat from the chaff. In the language of information retrieval this is favoring recall over precision. SEARCH describes the user interface in detail.

### 3.3 Hardware and Software Architecture

The goals of our hardware and software systems are speed of information delivery to the user, and ease of maintainability for the staff. We thus pre-compute many things during our long indexing process for later use by the search engine; we have highly optimized all code which is run by user processes; we have developed a worldwide network of mirror sites to speed up internet access. ARCHITECTURE describes these systems.

### 3.4 Data Ingest

The basic rule for what books and periodicals the ADS covers is: if it is in the Center for Astrophysics library it should be in the ADS. As a goal we are still some ways from realization. We have recently adopted a second rule for inclusion: if it is referenced by an article in a major scholarly journal of astronomy it should be in the ADS. DATA describes the ADS coverage, and ingest procedures.

## 4  Urania

The idea that the internet could be used to link sources of astronomical information into a unified environment is more than a decade old; it was fully expressed in the planning for the old ADS (Squibb & Cheung (1988)) and ESIS (Adorf, et al. (1988)) projects. These early attempts were highly data oriented, their initial goals were the interoperability of different distributed data archives, primarily of space mission data.

Astronomical data is highly heterogeneous and complex; essentially every instrument has its quirks, and these must be known and dealt with to reduce and analyze the data. This quirky nature of our data essentially prevented the establishment of standardized tools for data access across data archives.

The new, hyperlink connected network data system for astronomy is based on the highest level of data abstraction, object names and bibliographic articles, rather than the lowest, the actual observed data in archives. This change in the level of abstraction has permitted the creation of a system of extraordinary power. This new system, still unique amongst the sciences, has been dubbed Urania (Boyce (1996)), for the muse of astronomy.

Conceptually the core of Urania is a distributed cross-indexed list which maintains a concordance of data available at different sites. The ADS maintains a list of sites which provide data organized on an article basis for every bibliographic entry in the ADS database. The CDS maintains a list of articles and positions on the sky for every object in the SIMBAD database. The CDS also provides a name to object resolver. The possibility for synergy in combining these two data systems is obvious; they have functioned jointly since 1993.

Surrounding this core, and tightly integrated with it, are many of the most important data resources in astronomy, including the ADS Abstract Service, SIMBAD, the fully electronic journals (currently ApJL, ApJ, ApJS, A&A, A&AS, AJ, PASP, MNRAS, New Astronomy, Nature, and Science), NED, CDS-Vizier, Goddard-ADC, and the ADS Article Service. All these groups actively exchange information with the Urania core, they point their users to it via hyperlinks, and they are pointed to by it.

The astronomy journals which are not yet fully electronic, in that they do not support hyperlinked access to the Urania core, also interact with the system. Typically they provide access to page images of the journal, either through PDF files, or bitmaps from the ADS Article Service, or both. Bibliographic information is routinely supplied to the ADS, and the SIMBAD librarians routinely include the articles (along with those of the electronic journals) in the SIMBAD object-article concordance.

While most data archives are not closely connected to the Urania system there are some exceptions. For example the National Center for Supercomputing Application’s Astronomy Digital Image Library (Plante, Crutcher, & Sharpe (1996)) connects with the ADS bibliographical data via links which are papers written about the data in the archive. SIMBAD connects with the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) (White (1992)) archive using the position of an object as a search key, HEASARC has an interface which permits several archives to be simultaneously queried McGlynn & White (1998), and a new data mining initiative between CDS and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) (Ortiz, et al. (1999)) will connect the Vizier tables with the ESO archives. Several archives use the SIMBAD (and in some cases NED) name resolver to permit users to use object name as a proxy for position on the sky, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) Digital Sky Survey (Postman (1996)) would be an example. The Space Telescope-European Coordinating Facility archive (Murtagh (1995)) allows ADS queries using the observing proposals as natural language queries, and the Principal Investigator names as authors.

The establishment and maintenance of the Urania core represents a substantial fraction of the ADS service. SEARCH discusses the user interface to the set of hyperlinks, ARCHITECTURE discusses the methods and procedures we use to implement and maintain the links, and DATA discusses the data sharing arrangements we have with other groups, and presents a complete listing of all our data sources.

## 5  Capabilities, Usage Patterns, and Statistics

### 5.1  Examples

The ADS answers about 5,000,000 queries per year, covering a wide range of possible query type, from the simplest (and most popular): “give me all the papers written by (some author),” to complex combinations of natural language described subject matter and bibliometric information. Each query is essentially the sum of simultaneous queries (e.g. an author query and a title query), where the evidence is combined to give a final relevance ranking (e.g. Belkin, et. al (1995)).

The ADS once supported index term (keyword) queries, but does not currently. This is due to the incompatibility of the old STI (NASA-STI (1988)) keyword system with the keywords assigned by the journals (Abt (1990); A&A (1992); MNRAS (1992)) . Work is underway to build a transformation between the two systems (Lee, Dubin & Kurtz (1999); Lee & Dubin (1999)).

Here we show four examples of simple, but sophisticated queries, to give an indication of what is possible using the system. A detailed description of available query options is in SEARCH. We encourage the reader to perform these queries now, to see how the passage of time has changed the results.

Figure 1 shows how to make the query “what papers are about the metallicity of M87 globular clusters?” This was the first joint query made after the SIMBAD-ADS connection was completed in 1993.

There are 1,765 papers on M87 in SIMBAD, NED, or both; there are 6,425 papers which contain the phrase “globular cluster” in ADS, and there are 25,599 papers in ADS containing “metallicity” or a synonym (abundance is an example of a synonym for metallicity). The result, which comes in a couple of seconds, is a list of just those 58 papers desired.

Five different indices are mixed in this query: the SIMBAD object—bibcode index query on M87 is logically OR’d with the NED object—refcode index query for M87. The ADS phrase index query for “globular cluster” is (following the user’s request) logically AND’d with the ADS word index query on metallicity, where metallicity is replaced by its group of synonyms from the ADS astronomy synonym list (this replacement is under user control). If the user requires a perfect match, then the combination of these simultaneous queries yields the list of 58 papers shown in figure 2. Before the establishment of the Urania core queries like this were nearly impossible.

Another simple, but very powerful method for making ADS queries is to use the “Find Similar Abstracts” feature. Essentially this is an extension of the ability to make natural language queries, whereby the user can choose one or more abstracts to become the natural language query. This can be especially useful when one wants to read in depth on a subject, but only knows one or two authors or papers in the field. This is a typical situation for many researchers, but especially for students.

As an example, suppose one is interested in Ben Bromley’s (1994) PhD thesis work. Making an author query on “Bromley” gets a list of his papers, including his thesis. Next one calls up the abstract of the thesis, goes to the bottom of the page, where the “Find Similar Abstracts” feature is found, and clicks the “Send” button. Figure 3 shows the top of the list returned as a result. These are papers listed in order of similarity to Bromley’s (1994) thesis; note that the thesis itself is on top, as it matches itself perfectly. This list is a detailed subject matter selected custom bibliography.

As a third example of ADS use figure 4 shows an intermediate step from the previous example (obtained by clicking on the “Return Query Form” button, replacing the default “Return Query Results” in the “Find Similar Abstracts” query. Here we make one change from the default setting: we change “Items returned” from the default “Abstracts” to “References.” The result, shown in figure 5 lists all the papers which are referenced in the 50 papers most like Bromley (1994), sorted by the number of times they appear in the 50 reference lists. Thus the paper by Bardeen et al. (1986) appears in 21 reference lists out of 50, the paper by Davis & Peebles (1983) appears in 11 lists out of 50, etc. By this means one has a list of the most cited papers within a very narrowly defined subfield specific to one’s personal interest. We are not aware of any other system which currently allows this capability.

Finally we show a somewhat more complex query in figure 6. Here we modify the basic query (Bromley’s (1994) thesis) by requiring that the papers contain the word “void.” We do this by changing the logic on the text query to “simple logic” and adding “+void” to the query. The returned papers to this query would be very similar to those shown in figure 3, but with all papers which do not contain the word “void” removed. In addition we change “Items returned” to be “Citations,” and increase the number of papers to get the citations for to the top 150 closest matches to the query. The result, shown in figure 7, are those papers which most cite the 150 papers most like Bromley’s (1994) thesis, modified by the requirement that they contain the word “void.” Thus the paper by El-Ad & Piran (1997) cited 26 papers out of the 150, the paper by Rood (1988) cited 19, etc. These are the papers with the most extensive discussions of a user defined very narrow subfield. This feature also is unique to the ADS.

### 5.2  Use of the System

In September 1998 ADS users made 440,000 queries, and received 8,000,000 bibliographic references, 75,000 full-text articles, and 275,000 abstracts (130,000 were individually selected, the rest were obtained through a bulk retrieval process, which typically retrieves between one and fifty), as well as citation histories, links to data, and links to other data centers. Of the 75,000 full-text articles accessed through the ADS in September 1998, already 33% were via pointers to the electronic journals. This number increased to 52% in March 1999.

ADS users access and print (either to the screen, or to paper) more actual pages than are printed in the press runs of all but the very largest journals of astronomy. In September 1998, 472,621 page images were downloaded from the ADS archive of scanned bitmaps. About 75% of these were sent directly to a printer, 22% were viewed on the computer screen, and 2% were downloaded into files; FAXing and viewing thumbnail images make up the rest. If the electronic journals provide “pages” of information at the same rate as the ADS archive, per article accessed (slightly more than 10 pages/article accessed), then more than 750,000 “pages” were “printed,” on demand, in September 1998 by ADS users. This is about three times the number of physical pages published in September 1998 by the PASP.

Viewed as an electronic library the ADS, five years after its inception, provides bibliographic information and services similar to those provided by the sum of all the astronomy libraries in the world, combined. The Center for Astrophysics Library, an amalgamation of the libraries of the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, is one of the largest, most complete, and best managed astronomy libraries in the world. For several years the CfA Library has been keeping records of the number of volumes reshelved, as a proxy for the number of papers read (library users are requested not to reshelve anything themselves). This number has remained steady in recent years, and was 1117 in September 1998 (D.J. Coletti & E.M. Bashinka 1998, personal communication). If the CfA represents 2–3% of the use of astronomy libraries, worldwide (the CfA has slightly more than 350 PhDs, the AAS has about 6800 members, the IAU about 8500, CfA users made 2.4% of ADS queries in September 1998, 5.7% of articles in the ADS Astronomy database with 1998 publication dates had at least one CfA author), and if other astronomers use their libraries at the same rate as astronomers at the CfA, then worldwide there would have been 37,000–56,000 reshelves in September 1998. In September 1998 ADS provided access to 75,000 full text articles and 130,000 individually selected abstracts, as well as substantial other information; current use of ADS is clearly similar to the sum of all current traditional astronomy library use.

ADS use continues to increase. Figure 8 shows the number of queries made each month to the ADS Abstract Service from April 1993 to September 1998, the dotted straight line represents a yearly doubling, which represents the five year history reasonably well. Since 1996 use has been increasing at a 17 month doubling rate, shown by the dashed line in the figure.

It is difficult to determine the exact number of ADS users. We track usage by the number of unique “cookies”<sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1A cookie is a unique identifier which WWW providers (in this case ADS) assign to each user, and store on the users computer using the browser. which access ADS, and by the number of unique IP<sup>2</sup><sup>2</sup>2Each Machine on the internet has a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address. addresses. There are difficulties with each technique. In addition many non-astronomers find ADS through portal sites like Yahoo, which skews the statistics. In September 1998 10,000 unique cookies accessed the full-text articles, 17,000 made queries, and 30,000 visited the site. 91% of full-text users had cookies, but only 65% of site visitors.

Figure 9 shows the number of unique users who made a query using the ADS each month from April 1993 to September 1998. Before early 1994 users had user names and passwords in the old, proprietary system, and could be counted exactly; after the ADS became available on the WWW users were defined as unique IP addresses. Note the enormous effect the WWW had on ADS use, a factor of four in the first five weeks. The straight dashed line represents the 17 month doubling period seen recently in the number of queries; the dotted line, which better represents the recent growth, is for a 22 month doubling period. The difference between the two is due to a one third increase in the mean number of queries per month per user (from 19 to 25) since 1996.

¿From another perspective, the number of unique IP addresses from a single typical research site (STScI) which access the full-text data in a typical month (September 1998) is 107, the number of unique cookies associated with stsci.edu which access the full-text data is 104, the number of unique IP addresses from STScI which make a query to ADS is 148 and the number of cookies is 140. The number of AAS members listing an STScI address is 145 (J. Johnson, personal communication), and the number of different people listing an STScI address in the Astropersons e-mail compilation (Benn & Martin (1995)) is 195. 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 the ADS on a regular basis. Most of the recent exponential growth of use of the ADS is due to an increased number of users; this growth cannot last much longer, the 17,000 who made queries in September 1998 are probably the majority of all those who could conceivably want to make a query of the technical astronomy literature.

## 6  How the Astronomical Literature is used

Electronic libraries, because they provide access to the literature on an article basis, can provide direct measures of the use of individual articles. Direct bibliometric studies of article use are rare, and tend to be based on small samples (e.g. Tsay (1998)); most bibliometric studies use indirect measures, particularly citation histories,(e.g. Garfield (1979); White & McCain (1989); Line (1993)), as proxies for use.

Astronomy is perhaps unique, in that it already has an integrated electronic information resource (ADS/Urania) which includes electronic access to nearly all the modern journal literature, and which is used by a large fraction of practitioners in the field, worldwide. The combined Urania logs, including the electronic journals and the ADS, probably represent a fair sample of total readership in the field, perhaps even a majority of the readership as well.

In this section we will investigate the use of the astronomy literature as shown by the ADS logs; for articles more than a few months past the publication date they probably represent accurately the use of the astronomy literature. For articles immediately after publication the logs of the electronic journals are the definitive source; this usage pattern is substantially different from the pattern shown in the ADS logs, for example, the half-life for article reads for the electronic Astrophysical Journal is measured in days (E. Owens, 1997, personal communication).

### 6.1  Readership as a Function of Age

The ADS logs provide a direct measure on the readership of individual articles. There are several different ADS logs, here we will use the “data” log. Entries in the data log correspond to individual data items selected from a list which is returned following a query, such as shown in figure 2. Each entry is the result of a user, who can see the authors and title of a paper, choosing to get more information. 61% of these requests are for the abstract, 34% are for the whole text, 2% are for the citation histories, as well as several other options; SEARCH lists all the options and their use. In what follows we will refer to any request for data as a “read.” By “age” we refer to the time since publication of an article, NOT the time since birth of the astronomer reading the article!

In this subsection we restrict the study to the January 1999 log, and only requests for information about articles published in the largest (in terms of ADS use) eight journals (ApJ, ApJL, ApJS, A&A, A&AS, MNRAS, AJ, PASP; hereafter the Big8). The Big8 represent 62% of the 270,000 entries in the January data log.

Figure 10 shows the number of ADS reads (solid line, left abscissa) during January 1999 for articles published in the Big8 from 1976 to 1998, and the number of Big8 articles for which at least one data item was requested (dotted line, right abscissa), on a log-linear plot, binned yearly. The ADS database is 100% complete in titles, and in links to the full text of articles (either to the ADS scans, or directly to the electronic journals), and is 99% complete in article abstracts for the Big8 journal articles published during this 22 year period.

The number of papers published in the Big8 has been increasing at about 4% per year during this 22 year period (Schulman et al. (1997); Abt (1998); figure 11), figure 12 shows the information in figure 10 divided by the number of papers published. The top line shows the mean number of reads per paper, and the bottom line shows the fraction (maximum 1) of papers published for which information was requested.

¿From 1976 to about 1994 the two lines are nearly parallel; this demonstrates that the change in readership with age is caused mainly by a change in the fraction of papers which are considered interesting enough to be read, not by a change in the number of times an interesting paper is read. Extrapolating the relation seen in the earliest 16 years of figure 12 we find that the fraction of articles interesting enough to be read is $`I=I_0e^{0.075T}`$, where T is the age of the article in years, and $`I_0`$ is about 0.7. Similarly readership declines as $`e^{0.09T}`$, so the mean number of reads per relevant article is $`M=M_0e^{.015T}`$, with $`M_0`$ equal to 2.5 reads per month. For articles between 4 and 22 years old the readership pattern is well fit by $`R=IM`$.

For articles younger than 4 years old the extrapolation of the $`R=IM`$ model substantially underestimates readership. While the fraction of read papers is only about 20% higher than the extrapolation (it could not be more than 30% after which all papers would be read), the mean reads per paper is 350% higher.

We postulate that there is another mode of readership, which dominates for articles between one month and four years old, we will call this “papers current enough to be read.” If we subtract the $`R=IM`$ model from the data we get the residual of papers current enough to be read. This can be well represented by $`C=C_0e^{0.85T}`$, where $`C_0`$ is equal to 5 reads per month. Now we have a two component model for readership (per article published), valid for papers between one month and 22 years old which is $`R=IM+C`$.

Figure 13 shows how well the model fits the actual readership data for January 1999. The solid line shows the difference between the log of the reads per paper published and the log of the model; the dotted lines show the $`1\sigma `$ errors, estimated using $`\sqrt{N}`$. Clearly the model fits the data well.

While the $`R=IM+C`$ model accounts for the vast majority of ADS use, there are at least two other modes of readership, which we will call “historical”, and “new”. The historical mode describes the use of very old articles, and the new mode describes the readership of the current issue of a journal.

The ADS in January 1999 had only one journal which is complete to an early enough time to measure the historical mode, the Astronomical Journal, which is complete from volume 1 in 1849. The data currently available (shown in figure 14) suggest a constant low level use, independent of time, $`H=H_0`$, where $`H_0`$ is 0.025 reads per month. With the database now being extended to include much of the literature of the past two centuries this parameterization should improve greatly in the next couple of years.

The new mode represents the readership of the latest issue of a journal. As soon as a journal is issued, either received in the mail, or posted electronically, a large number of astronomers scan the table of contents and read the articles of interest. Although ADS has a feature in the Table of Contents page which supports this type of readership, it does not represent a substantial fraction of ADS use. We believe most users do this either with the paper copy, or through the electronic journals directly. We can crudely estimate this mode in the ADS use by examining the daily usage logs following the release of new issues of the Astrophysical Journal, After subtracting the other modes already described we find $`N=N_0e^{16T}`$, where $`N_0`$ is about 3.5 reads per month. For an accurate description of this mode one would need to analyze the logs of the electronic journals.

Finally we have a four component model for how the astronomical literature is read, as a function of the age of an article, $`R=N+C+IM+H`$, where the first three terms are exponentials with very different time constants, and the fourth is a low level constant. ADS use certainly underestimates the amplitude of the $`N`$ term, and may underestimate the amplitude of the $`C`$ term, as there are alternative electronic routes to some of these data.

### 6.2  Comparison of Readership with Citation History

Citation histories have long been used to study the long-term readership of scientific papers (e.g. Burton and Kebler (1960)) with the basic result that the number of citations that a paper receives declines exponentially with the age of the article. While it is often assumed that the pattern of use is similar to the pattern of citation this has not been conclusively demonstrated. Recently Tsay (1998) has found that the mean use half-life for a set of medical journals was 3.4 years, while the mean citation half-life for the same journals was 6.3 years.

We will compare the use of some of the Big8 journals with their citation histories using two datasets: the ADS data logs for the period from 1 May 1998 to 31 July 1998, and the citation information provided to ADS by the Institute for Scientific Information covering references in articles published during the first nine months of 1998, and only covering references from 1981 to date. ISI does not provide us with the full citation histories, rather they provide us with pairs of citing and cited journal articles where both are in the ADS database, so the results will systematically underrepresent the citation histories of articles with substantial influence in areas outside astronomy, or where the primary references come from conference proceedings.

Figure 15 compares the citation histories of the Big8 journals with their readership; the abscissa refers to the citation information (dotted lines), the readership data (solid lines) have been arbitrarily shifted for comparison. The lower dotted line represents the fraction of Big8 journal articles which were cited during the first nine months of 1998; the upper dotted line represents the mean number of cites per article. The lower solid line shows the mean number of reads per article during the three month period May-July 1998, shifted by a factor of 19; the upper solid line shows the fraction of Big8 articles read, times 1.8.

The number of cites has the same functional form as the fraction of reads, And the fraction of cites has the same form as the number of reads. This result is perhaps surprising.

Except for the most recent year (1997), where the number of cites declined from the year before the number of cites per article declines with age as $`e^{0.09T}`$ or proportional to $`IM`$, the long term declining readership. The citation half-life for these articles, 7.7 years, is longer than the 4.9 years found by Gupta (1990) for the Physical Review, but is consistent with results of Abt (1981, 1996) of 20-30 year half-lives with no normalization, once one takes the increase in the number of astronomy papers/cites into account (Abt 1981, 1995).

The fraction of articles cited, on the other hand, appears to follow the same two component form as readership, $`R=IM+C`$. We postulate the following explanation for this behavior. The degree of citability we define as the degree to which a paper would be cited, were it possible. We postulate this is directly proportional to readership: $`D=D_0R`$. The large increase in the fraction of recent papers cited is thus due to the large increase in readership. We define the ability of a paper to be cited to be a steeply increasing function of age, simply because for one paper to cite another it must appear before the second paper is written, refereed, and published: $`A=1e^{1.5T}`$. Our model for the mean number of citations a paper receives, $`Z`$, as a function of age is: $`Z=Z_0AD`$ or $`Z=Z_0AD_0R`$.

Figure 16 shows the the number of citations per paper as a function of age (thick solid line), the $`Z=Z_0AD_0R`$ model using the actual number of reads per paper for $`R`$ (thin solid line), and the $`Z=Z_0AD_0R`$ model using the $`R=IM+C`$ model for $`R`$ (dotted line). The product of the constants $`Z_0D_0`$ is the number of citations per read, currently this is about 0.08.

The papers which are frequently cited tend also to be frequently read, although the correlation is not very strong. We rank the papers by number of cites/reads during the 1998 periods, and perform a Spearman rank correlation between the 26988 different Big8 papers cited and the 53755 papers read (57340 total), we obtain $`r_{Spearman}=0.35`$. This underestimates the correlation because it excludes papers which were neither cited nor read.

Of the 66392 Big8 papers published between 1982 and 1997 81% were read in the 3 month period using ADS, while 41% were cited during the 9 month period. The probability that a paper was not read declined sharply with the number of times it was cited. Figure 17 shows this; one paper each of the (324, 224, 126) papers which were cited (7, 8, 9) times went unread during the period; none of the 430 papers which were cited 10 or more times went unread.

The relations between the number of cites or reads of a paper and the rank that paper has when ranked by number of cites/reads are identical. If one takes papers published in a single year both cites and reads follow a Zipf (1949) power law $`nr^\alpha `$ ($`n`$ is the number of reads or cites, and $`r`$ is the rank of the paper with that many reads/cites), where $`\alpha `$ is $`\frac{1}{2}`$, this is the same result Redner (1998) found for citation histories for the physics literature. If papers from all years are taken together and ranked the power law index flattens identically for both cites and reads to $`\alpha =\frac{1}{3}`$.

### 6.3  How the Journals are Used

#### 6.3.1  The main journals

Figure 18 shows the fraction of articles published in the Big8 by each of the five main journals, leaving out the letters and supplements. We show the data only for articles published from 1983 to 1995. Before 1983 the data from ISI are less complete, and after 1995 the presence of the electronic journals, and the differing rules for the distribution of the ADS bitmaps, make the meaning of a “read” differ from journal to journal. The reads and cites data for figures 18, 19, and 20 comes from the same 1998 reporting periods described above.

Figure 19 shows the relative readership of papers as a function of journal and publication year. The abscissa is the ratio of the fraction of Big8 papers read and the fraction of Big8 papers published. Were all papers read equally frequently, independent on the journal in which they were published, figure 19 would show five straight lines at one; it does not. The papers from the AJ are read more on a per article basis than the other journals; the papers from A&A are read less. Recent PASP papers are read substantially more frequently than older ones, when compared with the readership patterns of the other journals.

Figure 20 shows the ratio of the fraction of citations an article received to the fraction of reads, as a function of journal and year. Were all articles cited in the same proportion to the number of times they were read (this is the constant $`Z_0D_0`$ in 6.2) then the figure would be five straight lines at one. The three bi- and tri-monthly journals do not show much deviation from straight lines at one, while the AJ appears to be systematically less cited than it is read. The PASP again shows an increase during the beginning of this decade.

Recall that the readership and citation information are from hundreds of thousands of individual decisions made by more than 10,000 astronomers during 1998. Taken together figures 18, 19, and 20 show the current opinion of astronomers as to the usefulness of articles as a function of journal and publication date. The growth of the AJ for example, from 6.5% of Big8 articles to 9.5% has not greatly affected the relative readership or citation rates for the journal.

The recent history of the PASP is perhaps the most interesting feature on figures 18, 19, and 20. From 1983 to 1995 the fraction of Big8 papers published by PASP declined from 6% to 3% . This decline is overstated, as PASP published some conference proceeding abstracts during the late 1980s, a practice which ended in 1991; the decline is nevertheless real: PASP published the same number of papers in 1995 as 19 years before, during which time the number of Big8 journal articles doubled.

Figure 19 shows two main features, fluctuations, and a slow rise. The large fluctuations during the late 80s and early 90s are due to two factors: fluctuations in the number of conference proceeding papers and abstracts; and the influence of Stetson (1987), which was read at twice the rate of the next most read paper from 1997, and four times the next most read PASP paper from that year. The rise in the readership measure during the 1990s is not caused by any known systematic; we believe it represents a real increase in the perceived usefulness of the journal.

Figure 20 also shows the influence of Stetson (1987), currently the third most cited article in the ADS database, although now without the addition of the fluctuations in article counts. It also shows the rise in the perceived usefulness per article (this time in the measure of cites per read). Noting that the number of cites per article is the product of figures 19 and 20 the rise in the number of cites per article, compared with the Big8 over the period 1989 to 1995 is a factor of three, so that now the journal is at full parity with the Big8. This demonstrates that the policy during this period was one of quality rather than quantity, a policy we dub “shaken, not stirred.”

#### 6.3.2  Loss of relative currency

All Big8 astronomical journals lose currency, the current usefulness of an article, at a rate described by the readership and citation models of 6.1 and 6.2. Any changes in the loss of currency of one journal with respect to the rest of the Big8 should be seen in figure 19 in the form of a relative decrease in readership, as a function of age. Indeed the changes in the PASP which we have attributed to changes in editorial policy could simply be a substantial loss of relative currency.

One of the Big8 journals, the Astrophysical Journal Letters is intended to lose currency more rapidly than the other journals. Figure 21 shows the relative fraction of articles published (thin solid), articles read (thick solid), and articles cited (dotted) for the ApJL from 1981 to 1997. Except for the period from 1994 to 1997 the curves track each other reasonably well; older ApJL papers are not cited or read any more or less than the Big8 average. For the more recent papers the cites and reads increase above the fraction published, implying that the journal is in some sense more current than average.

In terms of readership this effect is strongly affected by a systematic. During the 3 month period in 1998, most of the 1996 and all of the 1997 issues of MNRAS were not available electronically due to copyright constraints. This dramatically lowered the relative readership of that journal, pushing all the others up. Also all five journals which were fully electronic during 1997 show increases compared with AJ and PASP which were only available as bitmaps. Thus the increase in readership of the ApJL, the pioneer electronic journal (Boyce (1995)), could be due to its superior delivery system, rather than its content.

#### 6.3.3  Local differences in readership rates

Astronomers in different parts of the world read different journals at different rates than the average. Figure 22 shows three typical differences. The three curves show the ratio of readership fractions for a particular subset when compared with the rest of the world; a value of 1 means that there is no difference in relative readership. The thin solid line shows the MNRAS readership ratio for users who access the US site and have IP addresses ending in .uk; it shows that the British read Monthly Notices about 60% more than the world average.

The dotted line shows the A&A readership ratio for users of the Strasbourg mirror, and the thick solid line shows the AJ readership ratio for US users with an IP address ending in .edu. They show that Europeans/Americans read A&A/AJ about 20% more than the rest of the world. The ApJ also shows about a 20% increase in the US; the PASJ shows a 300% increase in Japan.

#### 6.3.4  Use of historical literature

The ADS is in the process of putting a large fraction of the astronomical literature of the past two centuries on-line via bitmapped scans. The first nineteenth century journal to be fully on-line is the Astronomical Journal, which was first fully on-line on 1 January 1999. Figure 14 shows the raw readership figures for the first two months of 1999 (US logs only), this shows the current readership of 150 years of the journal.

Clearly the back issues are being read; the only year where the journal was published, but no paper was read in the two months, was 1909, where only 12 papers were published. Also there is a break in the exponential falloff with age for articles published between 1950 and 1960, where approximately twice the expected readership occurred. During this period 94 different users read 283 articles; the biggest user made 13 reads. We have no explanation for this increased use. The only other period where the use is not predicted by the $`C+IM+H`$ model of 6.1 is the first decade of the journal’s existence, perhaps due to curiosity.

## 7  The Impact of the ADS on Astronomy

It is difficult to judge the impact of scientific work. For scientific programs citation histories, personal honors and awards, and the success of students can give a measure of impact. For support type programs these measures do not suffice; the impact of the 200-inch Hale Telescope (Anderson (1948), Rule (1948)) or the 4-meter Mayall Telescope (Crawford (1965)) clearly extends beyond the papers and honors of their respective developers. The impact of large software projects is, if anything, even harder to quantify; the large data reduction environments, like AIPS (Fomalont (1981), Greisen (1998)), MIDAS (Banse et al. (1983)), or IRAF (Tody (1986)) have transformed astronomy, but how much?

The ADS is perhaps unique among large support projects in that a reasonably accurate quantitative estimate of its impact can be made. This is because many of the services the ADS provides are just more efficient methods of doing things astronomers have long done, and found worth the time it took to do them.

We will assign to each of several ADS functions a time which is our estimate of the increase in research time which accrues to the researcher by virtue of using that function. Our fundamental measure will be the time saved in obtaining an article via the ADS, which we estimate from the time it takes to go to the library, find the volume, photocopy the article, and return to the office, as 15 minutes. We then estimate that reading an abstract, a reference list, or a citation history saves $`1/3`$ of the full article time, or 5 minutes, and we arbitrarily assign a one minute time savings to each query.

We can now estimate the impact of ADS, in terms of FTE (Full Time Equivalent, 2000 hour) research years, by examining the ADS usage logs. We note that about half of the full text articles currently retrieved via the ADS come from the on-line journals, which certainly deserve credit for their work. Also we are ignoring several important (but hard to quantify) aspects of the ADS service, such as links from other web sites (e.g. the HTML journals), the synergy of joint ADS/SIMBAD and ADS/NED queries (e.g. that in figure 1), the bulk retrieval of abstracts and LATEX formatted references (about 200,000 per month), and the more than 10,000,000 references returned each month. We think that what follows is a reasonable estimate of the impact of the ADS on astronomy, and that the impact of the full Urania collaboration is substantially more.

Using the March 1999 worldwide combined ADS logs there were 113,471 full text articles retrieved, 195,026 abstracts (individually selected), 10,663 citation histories, and 3,702 reference pages retrieved, and 582,836 queries made. Using the estimated time savings above we find that the impact of the ADS on astronomy is 333 FTE research years per year, approximately the same as the entire Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

If we crudely estimate that there are 10,000 FTE research years in astronomy each year the ADS can be viewed as accounting for 3.33% of astronomy. Currently the ADS contains 27,712 (11,834) articles (refereed articles) in the astronomy database dated 1998, so one way of expressing the impact of the ADS would be 923 (394) articles (refereed articles) per year.

While the efficiencies brought about by the technologies inherent in the ADS and Urania are permanent, and will contribute (compounded) to the accelerating pace of discovery in astronomy, one can ask what was gained by being first. Risks were taken in funding the early development and adoption of technologies via the ADS and Urania. Also, had nothing been done, the “winning” technologies would eventually be adopted with very little risk.

To judge the payoff we adopt a simple model; we assume that the increase in research efficiency due to the ADS has increased linearly from zero in 1993 to 333 FTE research years in 1999, and that it will decrease linearly to zero over the next six years, after which there will be no difference in the technologies employed.

This yields a sum impact from the early creation of the ADS of 2,332 FTE research years, which is 23% of the astronomical research done in a single year, or 6463 (2760) papers (refereed papers). This is surely equal to the impact of the very largest and most successful projects. Doing this analysis for the entire Urania would yield a substantially increased amount.

## 8  Acknowledgments

Peter Ossorio is a pioneer in the field of automated text retrieval, he gave freely of his ideas in the early phase of the project. Geoff Shaw provided the enthusiasm to keep the Abstract Service project going during the long period of no funding.

Margaret Geller gave crucial encouragement at the time of the original prototype. Frank Giovane long believed in the possibilities of the Abstract Service, and acted as a friend in high places.

Todd Karakashian wrote much of the software at the time of the public release, he left in 1994. Markus Demleitner joined the ADS project in April 1999, he has already produced much of value.

There are about a dozen individuals at the Strasbourg Observatory, and the Strasbourg Data Center to thank, too many to thank individually. The data services provided by them are at the heart of the new astronomy; their collaboration with the ADS has been both very fruitful, and a great joy.

Peter Boyce, Evan Owens, and the electronic Astrophysical Journal project staff have had the vision necessary to do things first. Their collaboration has been important to the success of the ADS, and crucial to the success of Urania.

Without the long term support from NASA, and Günter Riegler in particular, the ADS would not now exist.

We are supported by NASA under Grant NCC5-189.