Using BibTeX entries generated by ADS

The BibTeX entries that the NASA Astrophysics Data System creates are meant to be easily integrated as bibliography files in your electronic document editing process when preparing a paper for submission to a journal or conference. This short document discusses some of the possibilities available to those people who want to use BibTeX records generated by ADS in their day-to-day publishing process.

Using AASTeX Macros

As of version 5.0, the AASTeX Package in conjunction with the apj.bst style file from Jonathan Baker's AstroNat package allows the easy inclusion of BibTeX records in manuscripts prepared for all the AAS journals (as well as A&A and MNRAS, actually). This allows you to write your paper and reference a bibliographic records downloaded from ads by simply using the \cite{BIBCODE} in the body of your paper and then using bibtex to include a properly formatted bibliographic entry for BIBCODE in the final revision of the DVI or PDF paper.

Here is an example: consider the file aas_ex.tex: 

\documentclass{aastex}
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{apj}
\begin{document}

Here is a reference to a paper in Annual Reviews: \cite{1974ARA&A..12..279Z}.

\bibliography{adssample}
\end{document}
The TeX file references the paper identified by the bibcode 1974ARA&A..12..279Z, and it instructs bibtex to look for such a bibliographic entry in the file adssample.bib. The entry in question (which has been downloaded from ADS and pasted into the file adssample.bib) looks like the following: 
@ARTICLE{1974ARA&A..12..279Z,
  author = {{Zuckerman}, B. and {Palmer}, P.},
  year = 1974,
  title = {{Radio radiation from interstellar molecules}},
  journal = {\araa},
  volume = 12,
  pages = {279--313},
  url = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1974ARA%26A..12..279Z&db_key=AST},
  adsnote = {Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

We can now run latex (or pdflatex) and bibtex as usual on the input file to generate a DVI (or PDF) file: 

pdflatex aas_ex
bibtex aas_ex
pdflatex aas_ex
pdflatex aas_ex
to generate a correctly formatted output file.

Rolling your own style file

For the more adventurous users interested in creating PDF or HTML documents from their latex source which include links to online records in ADS, there are some packages out there that can be used for this purpose. The ones we have tested and reccommend are hyperref and pdflatex, which are capable of creating PDF files containing hyperlinks. Both packages are available from CTAN (the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network).

In order to make use of the URLs contained in the Bibtex files created by ADS, you need to use a bibtex style file that inserts the URL field in the output dvi file. One of such style file is the plainnat format that comes with the natbib package. Alternatively, you may want to try a syle file that I created by hacking the original apj.bst from AstroNat. I called the file astroads.bst because it formats the references according to the well-estabilished syntax in use in astronomy but it is tweaked to create links with an ``[ADS]'' label for all entries generated by ADS. If you're interested, please download the following files and give it a try:

You can create a PDF file from these sources by executing the following procedures: 
pdflatex astroads_ex
bibtex astroads_ex
pdflatex astroads_ex
pdflatex astroads_ex
This will generate the PDF file astroads_ex.pdf containing links to online documents for those bibliographic entries which have a URL entry. Links to bibliographic entries generated by ADS will be properly identified and the label ``ADS'' (rather than the generic ``LINK'') will be displayed. Note: make sure you have a recent version of hyperref, since the earlier versions of the package (prior to 2001) don't work well with some of bibtex's quirks.

ads@cfa.harvard.edu