ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing over 15 million records, including all arXiv e-prints.

This effort was continued by Jérôme de La Lande who published his Bibliographie astronomique in 1803, a work that covered the period from 480 BCE to the year of publication.

After 1968, this was replaced by the yearly Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts book series, which continued until the end of the 20th century.

The first suggestion of a digital database of journal paper abstracts was made at a conference on Astronomy from Large Data-Bases held in Garching bei München in 1987.

The ADS Abstract Service became available for general use via proprietary network software in April 1993, and it was connected to SIMBAD a few months later.

In early 1994 the ADS web-based service was launched, which effectively quadrupled the number of active users in the five weeks following its introduction.

The ADS-beta system features a micro-services API and client-side dynamic page loading served on a cloud platform.

[9] Development continues to the present day, with an extensible API available: enabling users to build their own utilities on top of the ADS bibliographic record.

Some of these scanned articles up to around 1995 are available for free by agreement with the journal publishers,[11] with some dating from as far back as the early 19th century.

Eventually, because of a wider spread of online editions of journal publications, abstracts would start to instead be loaded into ADS directly.

Papers are indexed within the database by their bibliographic record which contains the details of the journal they were published in, and various associated metadata, such as author lists, references and citations.

[11] As of 2022, there are mirrors located in China, Chile, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine.

The common use of TeX and LaTeX by almost all scientific journals greatly facilitates the incorporation of bibliographic data into the system in a standardized format, and importing HTML-coded web-based articles is also simple.

ADS utilizes Python and Perl scripts for importing, processing and standardizing bibliographic data.

Citation lists have been used in the past to identify popular articles missing from the database; mostly these were from before 1975 and have now been added to the system.

[14] Since its inception, the ADS has developed a highly complex search engine to query the abstract and object databases.

This is common in the case of names including accents such as umlauts and transliterations from Arabic or Cyrillic script.

An example of an entry in the author synonym list is: The capability to search for papers on specific astronomical objects is one of ADS's most powerful tools.

Although it was conceived as a means of accessing abstracts and papers, ADS provides a substantial amount of ancillary information along with search results.

[18] The great importance of ADS to astronomers has been recognized by the United Nations, the General Assembly of which has commended ADS on its work and success, particularly noting its importance to astronomers in the developing world, in reports of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

A 2002 report by a visiting committee to the Center for Astrophysics, meanwhile, said that the service had "revolutionized the use of the astronomical literature", and was "probably the most valuable single contribution to astronomy research that the CfA has made in its lifetime".