NSR Help

The NSR database and the previous version of the NSR website are described in:
Brookhaven National Laboratory Report BNL-94690-2011-JA.

General Information

The Nuclear Science References (NSR) database is an indexed bibiliography of primary and secondary references in nuclear physics research. About 80 journals are regularly scanned for articles. Recent references are added on a weekly basis.

Each entry in NSR is assigned an eight-character keynumber. The first four digits of the keynumber give the publication year of the corresponding reference.

Most of the entries include keyword abstracts, which provide a brief summary of the subject matter in the given reference. These abstracts are also used to generate the indexed quantities in the database.

Entries for certain theory and review articles may not include keyword abstracts, especially if they do not deal with specific nuclides/reactions. These may still be retrieved in other ways, including author, text, or keynumber searches.

For more information on the scope of articles included in the database, see the "Scope and Completeness" section below.

We urge users who find errors to report them to us at nsr@bnl.gov.

Scope and Completeness

In general, articles are included in NSR if they include measured, calculated, or deduced quantitative data on nuclear structure or reactions.

Papers that apply previously-known data are generally not included. For example, NSR would not include neutron activation analysis using known cross-sections, or radiological dating using known half-lives.

NSR has existed for several decades, in various forms. Originally, its focus was on papers related to low-energy nuclear structure studies. Over time, its scope has widened to include more reaction and high-energy references. As a result, some older references may not be included in NSR, even if more current papers covering similar data are included.

As a rule, an effort is made to enter all new primary references that fall within the database scope. In order to avoid undue duplication, not all secondary references (reports, conferences, etc.) are entered.

Linking to NSR

The previous version of the NSR website could be linked to using the following:

where:

Each of these 3 output types has been re-implemented in the current version of NSR:

  1. OR

    will now redirect to

    and search for an entry corresponding to key-number.

    Example: https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/nsr/nsrlink.jsp?1857DE01,H

  2. will now redirect to

    and return the 80-column exchange text associated with key-number.

    Example: https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/nsr/nsrlink.jsp?1857DE01,X

  3. will now redirect to

    and search for the entry associated with key-number.

    If that entry contains a DOI, then NSR will redirect again to the DOI landing page.

    If that entry does not contain a DOI, then NSR will not redirect.

    Example: https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/nsr/nsrlink.jsp?2002RI06,B