DOIs and Lattice QCD gauge ensemble datasets

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Traditionally DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have been associated with published papers in the digital era, but papers are not the only research objects that physicists may want to search, use, and cite. We talked with Jim Simone of Fermilab about his efforts to get DOIs assigned to MILC collaboration datasets and to get records of them uploaded to INSPIRE.

How is Jim involved with the MILC collaboration?

Jim is a member of FERMILAB-LATTICE collaboration, which works closely with MILC on scientific projects involving matrix elements and flavor physics. MILC generates data sets consisting of lattice gauge configuration files, which the collaboration has made openly available for others to use, as is increasingly becoming required for federally funded research in the U.S.

What is the MILC collaboration’s connection to the International Lattice Data Grid (ILDG)?

Jim was an early organizer of the ILDG, which is intended as a data grid to enable collaborations to share gauge configurations. The ILDG metadata catalog had its limitations; it only held limited kinds of metadata, sometimes making it difficult for people to find what they were looking for. People involved with the project have been trying to fill in the gaps, including the biggest problem: connecting scientific papers produced by the data to the datasets.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, ILDG is considering to use INSPIRE as a catalog to connect papers with datasets, making the data usable and findable by all physicists, including HEP and nuclear phenomenologists, as ILDG is currently only used by lattice scientists. In INSPIRE the datasets and associated papers can be searched starting with the papers in order to see what configurations were used to get the results, though in the upcoming version of INSPIRE, the Data collection will be made public and searching will also be possible starting with the individual datasets and from there finding what papers were produced from these configurations.

Lattice1INSPIRE record of MILC dataset that has been cited. http://dx.doi.org/10.15484/milc.asqtad.en05b/1178157

Lattice2References in INSPIRE record of a paper that cited MILC datasets.

Why and how did Jim go about getting DOIs assigned to the datasets? What challenges did he face?

Jim believes DOIs, as public, persistent identifiers, are a natural mechanism to identify the datasets, which are public, first class data objects, and permanent. With DOIs, the configurations will be better integrated into the ILDG and INSPIRE.

In the case of published papers, DOIs are assigned by publishers, but this route would not work for datasets. While INSPIRE is equipped to directly issue DOIs, MILC’s direct connection to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) made it practical for DOIs to be issued by DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). In either case, DOIs are registered with the central agency DataCite.

ILDG has started a discussion on how other groups can get DOIs for their datasets. Outside the DOE, CERN also issues DOIs, and regional ILDG groups can help members get DOIs and serve as gatekeepers to keep the metadata clean and clear. DataCite can also help researchers find registration organizations.

For Jim it was a learning experience working with OSTI and interacting with their web services. As one of his main focuses was findability, Jim wanted to include lots of searchable metadata in the dataset records so to help physicists find the particular configurations they wanted. This amount of metadata was more than OSTI was used to receiving when minting DOIs, but they were able to work with Jim’s requests and he considered them a great help through the entire process

Beyond getting the DOIs assigned, another challenge was figuring out how citations should be marked up in papers, both written and digitally. With the goals of making the datasets findable and identifiable, Jim and the ILDG wanted people to be able to see the DOI in a print version of a reference list as well as click it in a digital version. In order to make the process as transparent as possible for people citing the datasets, Jim worked with us to include instructions in the metadata of the INSPIRE records and OSTI records.

Lattice3

For researchers unsure of how to cite datasets that do not include specific citation guidelines in their metadata, DataCite and CrossRef have developed a DOI citation formatter that can take a DOI registered by either of these services and format its citation in a variety of styles.

When going through the publication process with a paper that used MILC configurations, Jim found the referees and copy editors weren’t familiar with how the citations should appear. Most objects with a DOI are published papers that can be cited in written format using a journal reference, volume, page range, etc., so the DOI is often left out of the text of a reference list. However, following this standard would not make the datasets adequately identifiable to the human eye.

The community known as FORCE 11 (Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) has developed eight principles of data citation practices with equal emphasis on human readability and machine-actionability. As these recommendations become more widely endorsed in research communities and researchers become accustomed to citing datasets in their papers, the issue of human identifiable data citations will most likely be resolved.

What advice does Jim have for others looking to make their datasets more findable and citable?

Jim has two pieces of advice: get DOIs and mark up the metadata in a way that’s sensible for the community who will use the datasets. DataCite makes this simple by being explicit about its mandatory metadata requirements, while also allowing for additional recommended and optional metadata.

At INSPIRE we look forward to integrating more dataset DOIs into our records. Send your questions and comments about dataset DOIs in INSPIRE to feedback@inspirehep.net.

INSPIRE blog now also available in Chinese!

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The INSPIRE service is operated by a global consortium, including IHEP in Beijing , We strive to connect the global High-Energy Physics (HEP) community, indexing over 1.000.000 relevant publications and offering accurate author profiles with citation statistics. . To celebrate our global reach, and serve the diversity of our community, some of our blog posts relevant to the Chinese HEP community will also appear in Chinese on our pages.

Let us know what you think about this and check out INSPIRE-HEP blog and twitter for more news. Our Chinese colleagues can also check our China Weibo micro-blog

The importance of Jobs on INSPIRE

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In 2010 we moved the Jobs Collection from SPIRES to INSPIRE; 5 years later, this collection is one of the most visited and active on INSPIRE. Here are some statistics to illustrate how important the “Jobs Collection” appears to be to you.

Year_Jobs
Figure 1: Job posts through the last years

As you can see in Figure 1, the number of jobs that were posted in INSPIRE has increased a lot during the last 3 years. This is happening thanks to our colleagues’ efforts to scan all of the HR sections of the official webpages of the world’s scientific labs and universities to include related job postings. To make it easier for you to find the best job suited for you, we offer you compact and summarized information through features such as the job matrix.

Clicks_Jobs
Figure 2: Clicks on the Job Collection

In Figure 2, we notice that the use of the Jobs Collection continues to increase throughout the years and follows specific patterns. We can observe a seasonal growth of the traffic every fall, along with a general yearly 13% growth in traffic from 2013 to 2015. This only means for us that the service is an essential part of the scientific community’s workflow, a page that stays bookmarked for our users and is strongly connected to your quest for new opportunities and objectives. Our goal is to to serve the scientific community, so we will continue to gather more sources and to extend the coverage of this collection.

After analyzing this data, another interesting point that comes up is the scientific fields and the position levels that are offered through INSPIRE. In Figure 3 and 4 you can see the distribution of the offered positions, based on the field of physics and position level. As you can see, while INSPIRE is mostly useful for the HEP community, you can also find postings from many other fields of physics such as astro-ph. You find such job postings in an organized fashion by browsing the Job Matrix.

fields_jobs
Figure 3: Positions offered through INSPIRE in different fields of physics

level_jobs
Figure 4: Positions offered through INSPIRE in different employee levels

Finally, it is very interesting to track the breathing cycle of academia (Figure 5). Even if there were some slight changes through the years, we can notice that almost every year during September, October and November,the number of Job posts increases. Keep that in mind when you consider starting your job hunt.

Month_posting_Jobs
Figure 5: Job posting per month through the last years

We hope that we’ve cleared up some things concerning the Jobs section. We wish the best of luck for all of you who are currently seeking a job. For further information do not hesitate to contact us at jobs@inspirehep.net.

A guide to INSPIRE’s “Job Collection”

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INSPIRE cares for its community and always tries to find the best ways to address people’s academic and research needs.
“Jobs” is a very important collection because it provides a solution both for Institutions who are searching for new staff and for people who are searching for a job.

How to post Job openings on INSPIRE

If you have openings for positions in High Energy Physics and related fields, you can post your vacancies on INSPIRE. This is a quick and easy procedure. For students, postdoc, junior, senior, temporary and staff positions in the general field of physics, INSPIRE is a great place to search for candidates.

If you want to post a job, go to INSPIRE Jobs and “Add a posting” (Fig.1).

image01
Figure 1: Add a job posting on INSPIRE

The next step is to fill out a form (Fig.2) that will provide us with all the necessary information about the job you want to post on INSPIRE. This form will help you specify your exact needs for an employee and inform people of all the required qualifications. Not all fields are mandatory; however, the more information you provide, the easier it will be for people to find the posting and for you to attract more applications.

image04
Figure 2: Form for Job Vacancies

Finally, after submitting your job, a confirmation message will be sent for your submission. You cannot spot the job you submitted immediately, as it will be visible only after being approved by our staff. When this procedure is completed you will receive an e-mail, so make sure to provide a valid email address.

How to search for a Job in INSPIRE

If you are interested in searching for a job or studentship in physics, we have implemented a search algorithm that will help you find the right job for you. You can refine your search by level of the job, (junior, senior, phd, etc.), region (Europe, Asia, etc.) and field (astro-ph, cond-mat, physics, etc.) as you can see in Fig.3.

image00
Figure 3: HEPJobs search

With the Job Matrix (Fig.5), you can see how many positions exist at the moment that match your specifications and start applying. You can stay updated for new vacancies by subscribing to the RSS feed or by signing up to our mailing lists, which you can find at the bottom of the result pages or at the orange box (Fig:4).

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Figure 4: Subscribe to RSS feed

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Figure 5: Job Matrix

If you found this blog post interesting, stay tuned with our blog and twitter to read our next blog post about the importance of the “Jobs” collection to INSPIRE!

New self-cite search syntax

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Citation metrics are one of the most used features on INSPIRE. We are always looking for ways to enhance the options to search through citations and references.
We introduced three new search terms you can use to refine your search results and exclude self citations:

Note that ‘M.E.Peskin.1’ is an authorID.

If you have more requests for search syntax that might make your life easier, take a look at our search guide and tips and don’t hesitate to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net

For more helpful tips and information about our features follow INSPIRE’s blog and tweets.

Proceedings of Science Fulltexts

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Have you noticed something new about Proceedings of Science articles on INSPIRE-HEP? All of these records now have their fulltexts uploaded with searchable pdfs and references extracted. That’s over 10,000 articles!

PoS_screenshot

Because PoS, which is organized by the International School for Advanced Studies based in Trieste, Italy (SISSA), is an Open Access proceedings collection, INSPIRE is free to distribute its content to all users. You can find out more about PoS from its website: http://pos.sissa.it/POSwhat.html

The field of HEP is making some big moves in the direction of Open Access this year. Keep an eye out for even more fulltext content on INSPIRE in the near future.

Are you still learning how to search in INSPIRE? Here are three ways to take a look at the PoS records we have:

  • In Journals, search for Proceedings of Science orpos.

    journal_pos1

    Click on the journal title, and then click the link for “Articles in HEP”.

    journal_pos2

  • Using SPIRES-style searching type find j pos in the simple search (default search) box.

    journal_pos3

  • Using Invenio-style searching type journal:pos in the simple search box.

    search_pos01

More tips for searching in specific journals can be found here: https://old.inspirehep.net/help/search-tips#journals

INSPIRE adjusts astro-ph selection, all of cosmology is in

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Recently in consultation with our Advisory Board we changed how we select astro-ph articles from arXiv, to optimize collection of the content our community needs.

Since then we have been analysing the results of the new selection process and listening to your feedback. As a result, we are making an important adjustment to the selection policy to better suit your needs.

As of the past Friday, we are again harvesting 100% of astro-ph.CO content. This eliminates the possibility of missing relevant papers. We will soon fill in any cosmology content that was not added to INSPIRE in the past few weeks. We are working to provide the most accurate and comprehensive citation data, so no articles and citations are lost.

INSPIRE will now add content from a subset of astro-ph that is relevant to our community:

  • astro-ph.HE in its entirety
  • astro-ph.CO in its entirety
  • All pre-prints which are cross-listed to astro-ph.HE and astro-ph.CO, as well as astro-ph preprints from other sub-categories which are cross-listed to any of the core INSPIRE categories.
  • As always the case, articles relevant to HEP will be added on a case-by-case basis.

Astro-ph authors should also be aware that because INSPIRE’s focus is HEP, our automated tools are slightly less effective at correctly attributing astro-ph articles to their authors, and extracting all the references.

Consequently, we would like to call on astro-ph authors to ‘claim’ these articles in their profiles (check here) and submit corrections via the reference correction form if any references need improvement.

As always, we will keep an eye on the results, and make sure we are making optimal use of our resources to provide the best service possible for our user community.

We apologize for any confusion or concern during the pilot phase and we are most grateful to the community in supporting the way we adjust our services. We are eager to receive your feedback as we work together to make INSPIRE always better.

The INSPIRE Management Team

The 2013 Nobel prize in Physics awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert

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The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two particle physics theorists – François Englert and Peter W. Higgs today “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

The theorists published their papers independently in 1964 – the first one by François Englert and Robert Brout, and, a month later, a pair of papers by Peter Higgs.

In the graph below you can see the number of citations that each of the papers received yearly since 1964 when they were published, peaking in 2012 with the latest Higgs boson search results.

Higgs-Nobel-plot-revised-final
Click to enlarge the picture

The theories were confirmed on 4th July 2012, by ATLAS and CMS, the two experiments at the LHC that were searching for the new particle. The two collaborations include more than 3000 people each.

The two papers published shortly after the first evidence presented by the experiments, accumulated enormous numbers of citations in just one year.

About a month ago the ATLAS experiment made the datasets behind the likelihood function associated to the Higgs boson property measurements available to the public in digital format. The datasets can be easily accessed on INSPIRE.

More about the Nobel prize in today’s CERN press release.

Enabling data sharing, citation, and discovery

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[A guest post from our power user and advisory board member Kyle Cranmer]

We are familiar with the critical role of INSPIRE in searching for papers, following references, tracking citations, and providing author profiles. Now INSPIRE is taking steps to extend this service to data, thus creating a rich new layer to the information system of high energy physics.

Historically, papers have been the primary means for scientific communication; however, it is common to augment papers with data. The Durham HepData project has hosted this type of data for several years, and since last year, HepData is integrated with INSPIRE. Some papers have several datasets associated to it, so each dataset is given a unique, persistent Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Not only do these DOIs ensure that you can find the data, but they also provide a clear way to cite the data.

Let’s look at an example. Last month, ATLAS took an important step forward and released a digital form of the likelihood function associated to the Higgs boson property measurements. You can find these likelihood functions by clicking on the Data tab of the ATLAS paper. There are three datasets associated to this paper, and each has its own DOI. For instance, the H→γγ likelihood’s DOI is 10.7484/INSPIREHEP.DATA.A78C.HK44. If you click, the DOI will “resolve” to the INSPIRE record for this specific dataset (not the paper). From this record you can:

  • download the data from the “Files” tab
  • check which papers are citing this dataset from the “Citation” tab
  • follow the link to the original paper
  • export a properly formatted citation to the dataset itself

In addition to data coming from HepData, INSPIRE now supports data hosted in other third-party data repositories such as Figshare or The Dataverse Network. To test this out, I put some data from a phenomenological study of the CMSSM onto Dataverse — yes, theorists create data too! In this case, Dataverse issued the persistent identifier to our data since they take on the responsibility to store it. I sent the persistent identifier to INSPIRE and now it shows up in the data tab of our original paper. INSPIRE can now track citations to this data, which is hosted remotely. Nice!

The last example comes from a not-so-high-energy experiment I was involved in called APEX Jefferson Lab, which is searching for evidence of a 5th fundamental force of nature together with similar experiments such as DarkLight, HPS, and MAMI. Unlike the enormous LHC experiments, APEX had 66 collaborators that contributed to the test-run for this small, special-purpose experiment. The results of the test run were published in 2011, and this week the raw mass distribution from those 770,509 events collected by APEX was released directly on INSPIRE.

These three examples illustrate the diversity of data in HEP ranging from low-level experimental data, to theoretical predictions, to the results of statistical analysis. They also demonstrate the richness of the data layer and the need for a robust information system. Looking to the future, we can imagine an extended author profile that includes details on datasets analogous to what we are already have with papers.

Changes: coverage of astro-ph preprints in INSPIRE

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The Astronomy, Astrophysics and HEP communities have long relied on arXiv, ADS and INSPIRE for their communication. ADS has been tailored to the needs of the Astronomy and Astrophysics communities, and INSPIRE emerges from the HEP community. All three communities use arXiv to distribute preprints.

INSPIRE currently lists all astro-ph preprints appearing in arXiv. However, most of them are not immediately relevant to the HEP community and we do not provide additional services such as author disambiguation, affiliations, reference curation, conference information, etc. for these preprints.

Starting on the 1st of October, INSPIRE will only add a relevant subset of astro-ph:

  1. astro-ph.HE [High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena] in its entirety, including cross-listings
  2. For the rest of astro-ph, as for all other arXiv subcategories outside the CORE categories (see http://inspirehep.net/info/hep/collection-policy), we will take eprints cross-listed to the CORE categories.
  3. We will also take care to cover articles on dark matter and dark energy, as well as articles by the Planck Collaboration. Other articles relevant to HEP will be added on a case-by-case basis. For example, in the astro-ph.CO category [Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics], roughly 50% of the publications are HEP-related and will be added to INSPIRE.

We hope this will make it easier for users to find relevant content. Our friends at ADS will continue to be the natural port of call for those users who need a deeper analysis of Astronomy and Astrophysics content, and we are working behind the scenes to better integrate the services of our two systems.