A new way to add and update references in INSPIRE

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Citations are an important part of the service INSPIRE provides, as we know from your feedback. Ensuring that your citations are correctly counted requires an enormous amount of technical infrastructure and human effort in order to keep the reference lists of records current.   Not only do we parse references from many different formats in LaTeX and PDF, but papers are updated both at arXiv and in the process of publication in a journal, and of course there are plain old mistakes and omissions.

Over time at SPIRES we developed a mechanism for feedback if you find an error in our reference lists, but those of you who used it regularly know that it was very tedious to get all the information in the right format for us to enter easily.  Fortunately, INSPIRE brings us into the 21st Century with a new web-based form that allows you to add references to a record without cutting and pasting or having to know the abbreviations of journal names by heart.

For details on how to use this new form see:

http://inspirebeta.net/help/reference_corrections

This form should make it much easier to add missing references than our previous methods, and allows our INSPIRE team to approve your corrections quickly.  

Heath O’Connell

Fermilab

INSTITUTION database on INSPIRE

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The INSPIRE literature database, successor to the SPIRES literature database, will soon leave the beta stage as its teething troubles have been overcome (or soon will be) thanks to generous feedback from our users.

So now it’s time for the other SPIRES databases (conferences, experiments, hepnames, institutions, jobs) to follow suit and make their transition to INSPIRE. The second one to migrate has been the INSTITUTION database, now accessible at http://inspirehep.net/collection/Institutions. It offers information on about 10k institutions worldwide publishing HEP-related material.
You will witness major changes to this database over the next months, among them a more consistent and transparent naming of the affiliations in HEP records, more detailed information on papers published by an institution, geographical distribution, collaboration networks and more.

Annette (CERN)

The topcited HEP paper of all time.

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For as long as the annual topcited papers lists have been around, the all-time champion has been Weinberg’s “A model of leptons”, the 1967 paper that laid the foundation stone for the Standard Model. 30 years later, in November of 1997, the paper The Large N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity by Maldacena appeared that established a connection between string theory and quantum field theory. It immediately set of a revolution in HEP and was the most highly cited paper ever since. Remarkably, its highest citation count was in 2010, where it received over 1,000 citations in a single year! One reason for this is the heavy ion results from Brookhaven that drew people to conclude that, based on Maldacena’s work, the quark gluon plasma can be modeled using string theory techniques.