Information on NED's Keywords

NED has adopted keywords from ARIBIB. This was derived from information given in the printed bibliography Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts (A&AA) which covered the entire astronomical literature published from 1969 until mid-2000. The Abstracts were published by the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut Heidelberg, having been produced in cooperation with the Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe (FIZ) (since 1988), and since 1995, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (formerly the Institution of Electrical Engineers, IEE). A&AA were also under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union.

This information, as given in the A&AA, is of sufficiently high pedigree and uniqueness that it is also available on-line in the databases INSPEC (from IEE) and INSPHYS (from FIZ/STN). In addition to the keyword information in ARIBIB, the printed volumes of A&AA also contained abstracts.

The editing of this series always included strong scientific leadership from active astronomers. In the last decades of its publication, this editorial staff included Inge Heinrich, Ute Esser, Lutz D. Schmadel, Vladimir Matas, Wilfred Hofmann, and Gernot Burkhardt, with science oversight from Professors W. Fricke & Roland Wielen.

These editors and their associates scanned the text, titles and abstracts of every published paper, tagging each from a lexicon of nearly 2,000 keywords. This endeavor, spanning more than 30 years, built A&AA, the principal means of comprehensively searching the astronomical literature for the latter half of the 20th Century.