Michael J. Kurtz

The Science Explorer (SciX) digital library is a cutting-edge solution designed to address the growing complexity of accessing, evaluating, and synthesizing the expanding body of literature in Earth and environmental sciences. While the Earth System itself remains as intricate as ever, the challenge today lies in navigating an increasingly vast and diverse array of research and data. SciX responds to this need by providing a centralized, open-access platform that enhances the discovery and integration of scientific literature, all while adhering to the FAIR principles—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.In this session, we will showcase how SciX empowers researchers to efficiently explore a vast repository of scholarly publications relevant to the Earth and environmental sciences. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, SciX optimizes literature search and discovery, enabling users to easily locate, evaluate, and engage with the most pertinent scientific papers and resources. Features like personalized searches, citation exports, and tailored alerts allow researchers to stay at the forefront of their fields.We will also highlight the powerful bibliometric tools within SciX, including parameterized search and advanced visualization capabilities. These bibliometric visualizations help researchers uncover connections between authors, citations, and emerging research trends, enabling the identification of potential collaborators across disciplines and fostering a broader, more integrated approach to scientific inquiry. By mapping key contributors and intellectual networks, SciX facilitates cross-disciplinary collaboration, enhancing the impact of research across the Earth System.At the heart of SciX is a commitment to open science and continuous user engagement. The platform evolves based on user-driven feedback, ensuring that it meets the evolving needs of the scientific community. This presentation will demonstrate how SciX is shaping the future of literature review, collaboration, and interdisciplinary research in Earth and environmental sciences.Attendees will leave with practical insights into how SciX can streamline their literature review process, promote collaboration across scientific disciplines, and help tackle the challenges of today’s rapidly expanding research landscape.

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a critical research service for the astrophysics community, strives to provide the most accessible and inclusive environment for the discovery and exploration of the astronomical literature. Part of this goal involves creating a digital platform that can accommodate everybody, including those with disabilities that would benefit from alternative ways to present the information provided by the website. NASA ADS follows the official Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard for ensuring accessibility of all its applications, striving to exceed this standard where possible. Through the use of both internal audits and external expert review based on these guidelines, we have identified many areas for improving accessibility in our current web application, and have implemented a number of updates to the UI as a result of this. We present an overview of some current web accessibility trends, discuss our experience incorporating these trends in our web application, and discuss the lessons learned and recommendations for future projects.

We announce the public release of 141,531 moderate-dispersion optical spectra of 72,247 objects acquired over the past 25 yr with the FAST Spectrograph on the Fred L. Whipple Observatory 1.5 m Tillinghast telescope. We describe the data acquisition and processing so that scientists can understand the spectra. We highlight some of the largest FAst Spectrograph for the Tillinghast Telescope (FAST) survey programs, and make recommendations for use. The spectra have been placed in a Virtual Observatory–accessible archive and ready for download.

Some of the most exciting and promising areas of Astronomy research today are found at the boundaries of the discipline: the search for Exoplanets and Multi-Messenger Astronomy. In order to achieve breakthroughs in these research fields over the next decade, innovation and expansion of the digital information infrastructure which supports this research is required. Astronomy has been well-served by the existence of an open, distributed network of data centers and archives. However, institutional barriers and differing research cultures have prevented cross-disciplinary collaborations, creating fragmented knowledge and stove-piped research activities. This must change in order for the broader community of scientists to work together and solve our most ambitious decadal challenges. Interdisciplinary inquiry is best supported by bringing researchers together at the information discovery level. In order to cross the traditional disciplinary silos we must allow scientists both to explore new ideas and to gain access to new data and knowledge. This is best enabled by providing discovery platforms which allow them to explore and connect different research threads in the literature, identify communities of experts, access and analyze the related published datasets, measurements and catalogs.

In this paper we provide an update concerning the operations of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), its services and user interface, and the content currently indexed in its database. As the primary information system used by researchers in Astronomy, the ADS aims to provide a comprehensive index of all scholarly resources appearing in the literature. With the current effort in our community to support data and software citations, we discuss what steps the ADS is taking to provide the needed infrastructurein collaboration with publishers and data providers. A new API provides accessto the ADS search interface, metrics, and libraries allowing users to programmatically automate discovery and curation tasks. The new ADS interface supports a greater integration of content and services with a variety of partners, including ORCID claiming, indexing of SIMBAD objects, and article graphics from a variety of publishers. Finally, we highlight how librarians can facilitate the ingest of gray literature that they curate into our system.

Bibliometric indicators, citation counts and/or download counts are increasingly being used to inform personnel decisions such as hiring or promotions. These statistics are very often misused. Here we provide a guide to the factors which should be considered when using these so-called quantitative measures to evaluate people. Rules of thumb are given for when begin to use bibliometric measures when comparing otherwise similar candidates.

Conceptually exoplanet research has one foot in the discipline of Astrophysics and the other foot in Planetary Science. Research strategies for exoplanets will require efficient access to data and information from both realms. Astrophysics has a sophisticated, well integrated, distributed information system with archives and data centers which are interlinked with the technical literature via the Astrophysics Data System (ADS). The information system for Planetary Science does not have a central component linking the literature with the observational and theoretical data. Here we propose that the Committee on an Exoplanet Science Strategy recommend that this linkage be built, with the ADS playing the role in Planetary Science which it already plays in Astrophysics. This will require additional resources for the ADS, and the Planetary Data System (PDS), as well as other international collaborators

Measures for research activity and impact have become an integral ingredient in the assessment of a wide range of entities (individual researchers, organizations, instruments, regions, disciplines). Traditional bibliometric indicators, like publication and citation based indicators, provide an essential part of this picture, but cannot describe the complete picture. Since reading scholarly publications is an essential part of the research life cycle, it is only natural to introduce measures for this activity in attempts to quantify the efficiency, productivity and impact of an entity. Citations and reads are significantly different signals, so taken together, they provide a more complete picture of research activity. Most scholarly publications are now accessed online, making the study of reads and their patterns possible. Click-stream logs allow us to follow information access by the entire research community, real-time. Publication and citation datasets just reflect activity by authors. In addition, download statistics will help us identify publications with significant impact, but which do not attract many citations. Click-stream signals are arguably more complex than, say, citation signals. For one, they are a superposition of different classes of readers. Systematic downloads by crawlers also contaminate the signal, as does browsing behavior. We discuss the complexities associated with clickstream data and how, with proper filtering, statistically significant relations and conclusions can be inferred from download statistics. We describe how download statistics can be used to describe research activity at different levels of aggregation, ranging from organizations to countries. These statistics show a correlation with socio-economic indicators. A comparison will be made with traditional bibliometric indicators. We will argue that astronomy is representative of more general trends.

The Smithsonian Hectospec Lensing Survey (SHELS) is a complete redshift survey covering two well-separated fields (F1 and F2) of the Deep Lens Survey (DLS). Both fields are more than 94% complete to a Galactic extinction corrected R ₀ = 20.2. Here, we describe the redshift survey of the F1 field centered at R.A.₂₀₀₀ = 00^h53^m25.ˢ3 and decl.₂₀₀₀ = 12°33′55″; like F2, the F1 field covers ∼4 deg². The redshift survey of the F1 field includes 9426 new galaxy redshifts measured with Hectospec on the MMT (published here). As a guide to future uses of the combined survey, we compare the mass metallicity relation and the distributions of D _n 4000 as a function of stellar mass and redshift for the two fields. The mass–metallicity relations differ by an insignificant 1.6σ. For galaxies in the stellar mass range 10¹⁰–10¹¹ M _⊙, the increase in the star-forming fraction with redshift is remarkably similar in the two fields. The seemingly surprising 31%–38% difference in the overall galaxy counts in F1 and F2 is probably consistent with the expected cosmic variance given the subtleties of the relative systematics in the two surveys. We also review the DLS cluster detections in the two fields: poorer photometric data for F1 precluded secure detection of the single massive cluster at z = 0.35 that we find in SHELS. Taken together, the two fields include 16,055 redshifts for galaxies with and 20,754 redshifts for galaxies with R ≤ 20.6. These dense surveys in two well-separated fields provide a basis for future investigations of galaxy properties and large-scale structure.