bibcode

A bibcode is a type of reference code to identify journal articles, used by some astrophysics journal-article repositories and indexes, consisting of 19 ascii characters used as follows:

• four characters for the year.
• a five character journal abbreviation/code.
• four characters for the volume number.
• one character for the section (or first digit of a five-digit starting page).
• four characters for the starting page.
• one character for first character of last name of first author.

Unused characters are filled with periods. Some databases that make use of it:

• NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED)
• SIMBAD
• Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Example bibcode:

2024AJ....167..193T

which refers to the article published in year 2024 in The Astronomical Journal, Volume 167, page 193, for which the first letter of the first author's last name begins with "T".