nectar (SciX fork)

Status: archived. Working fork of adsabs/nectar from my time on the NASA ADS / SciX team, kept as work history. The master branch tracks upstream as of January 2026 and adds nothing on its own; the fork's content lives in its branches.

What this is

Nectar is the server-side-rendered web application behind scixplorer.org, the NASA Science Explorer (SciX) literature search interface. The stack is Next.js with TypeScript and Chakra UI, tested with Vitest (unit) and Playwright (end-to-end). This fork carried SciX feature branches, UI mockups, and experiments between 2023 and 2026.

Branches worth reading

• sj/fine-tune (2026, 8 commits): natural-language search prototype. Adds an NLSearch component, /api/nl-search and /api/nl-report-issue endpoints, field-constraint mapping in src/lib/field-constraints.ts, and a setup guide in docs/NL_SEARCH_SETUP.md. Queries route to a fine-tuned model hosted on Modal, configured through environment variables; the branch ships unit and Playwright tests for the feature.
• SCIX-265-orcid-ui (2023, 27 commits): ORCID claiming UI work; sorting, editable aliases, and a bulk-action menu.
• journalsdb and retreat_journaldb (2024): journals database browsing with sorting and per-journal links.
• intro-mockup and intro-page (2025): introductory landing pages with discipline-specific search examples.
• SCIX-445-facet-buttons-mockup (2025): facet button placement mockup.
• planetary-demo (2023): configuration enabling experimental features for a planetary-science demo.

The remaining branches (adsws-only, disable-ads-mode, gateway_updates, test-improvements, 1.x) carry smaller working changes.

Related repos

• nls-finetune-scix: the fine-tuning infrastructure behind the sj/fine-tune branch; converts natural-language questions into ADS/SciX search queries and evaluates them against the ADS API.
• scix-agent: agent-navigable knowledge layer over the ADS/SciX corpus, exposed through an MCP server.
• save_ADS_SciX: landing page advocating continued funding for ADS and SciX.

Upstream

Active development continues at adsabs/nectar, which remains the source of truth for building and running the application.