Keith’s note: Goodbye ADS – Hello SciX. According to an editorial “Farewell NASA ADS” in Nature magazine, “After more than 33 years, NASA’s Astrophysics Data System will close its virtual doors in November 2026 and be replaced by its much-expanded successor, Science Explorer. … Researchers whose work spans multiple fields — astrobiologists, for example — will be able to experience the joy of using ADS with substantially expanded search results, covering their entire discipline.”
So now that we are in the whole Super Intelligence (nee Artificial Intelligence) era where NASA and everyone else is charged with superintelligencing (sp) everything. Science Explorer (SciX) is dropping its new search version. Let’s see if it is better than what it replaces and if it is intelligent ‘super’ or otherwise.
I approached using SciX as a new user. Nature Magazine seemed to think that the astrobiology community would love it for its cross disciplinary goodies. But for a new improved product out in public beta – one wherein astrobiology fans are sought out as beneficiaries – well, I beg to differ. Given what passes for online information systems in this SI/AI era, SciX is not even a contender.
I’d submit an inquiry to NASA PAO to ask about all of this but there’s really no one home there designated to answer superintelligence for the agency – who can engage in a discussion about this – much less answer nerdy questions like mine. Anyway, back to my trial run.
Here’s a synopsis of my trial run. I use these various repositories multiple times a day. Now that the venerable Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is being swallowed into SciX. So let’s see what happens when I do my usual astrobiology search on it. For the large search box that appears – without changing anything else – you get to search ‘abstract’ as the top choice. So I chose that and then entered in the format abs: “astrobiology” and I got 991,732 results – but a bunch of old papers show up at the top. I click “relevance” and select “date” and I get a bunch of papers that have next to nothing whatsoever to do with “astrobiology” (I can’t find where they use the word) and all have 2028 or 2027 publishing dates. But I am not getting things that are new and relevant to astrobiology.
Yet if I go to arxiv.org and simply search for “astrobiology” I get a crazy long list of astrobiology papers and preprints that is up to the minute. If I go to PubMed and search for “astrobiology” – same thing. Same goes for BioRxiv ; X-MOL and of course Google Scholar.
Of course I could just go to your run-of-the mill AI online like Grok or Claude or whomever and get stuff too – faster. If you use the existing ADS system and limit things to the Astronomy collection you get some good results – but they are lacking. I am not sure SciX is that much of an improvement – especially in an ever-accelerating erra where generic public AI products can run circles around old fashion database things like this. SciX is clunky.
To be certain, this is a scientific resource and is not intended for general reference. But people outside of the science realm will still try and use it. the Alternative other than Google etc. is to try to use the search feature on NASA.gov – which can send you to thousands of out of date things in weirdly ranked order. No focus has been given by NASA to truly utilize all of these amazing and ever improving tools that everyone else seems to use to present anything you want to know about NASA – anywhere – from a budget smartphone to shared computer in a library.
If you look at my website Astrobiology.com (operating for over 30 years) I seem to do a good job of surfing over the broad array of topics that comprise an Astrobiologist’s curiosity zone. Depending on the day and location when/where you search Google for “astrobiology”, my astrobiology.com site is in the top three – sometimes outranking NASA’s astrobiology efforts itself. So I guess I am doing something sort of right. But I am just a senior citizen sitting in his basement on a laptop. Something is wrong here.
Alas, Someone needs to build a true astrobiology search system. Maybe I will do it – better yet I will ask some AI to do it for me. Are you busy Hal?
