Working with collaborations

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When it comes to INSPIRE searching, large collaborations have two notable features: they write a lot of papers and they have a lot of authors. This can lead to two difficulties when searching:

  • Because collaborations have a lot of authors, many searches for theorists and other authors not on a collaboration will also return papers by collaborations where someone has a similar name.
  • If you are looking for papers by the full collaboration, individual members of the collaboration write a lot of conference papers and these will also show when you try to find the official results of the full collaboration.

INSPIRE can help with both of these issues using a new feature, the author-count (ac) index, introduced recently on our blog. To address challenge 1 you can limit the search to papers with less than, say, 10 authors, e.g.: find a j smith and ac 1->10

To address challenge 2 you want to restrict the result to papers with, say, greater than 100 authors, e.g.: find exp cern-lhc-atlas and ac 100+

As always, INSPIRE allows you to use author-count in all kinds of searches to get just the result you want.

P.S. You can also figure out the citation summary for the papers that, for example, Richard Feynman wrote alone with find a feynman and ac 1.

INSPIRE maintenance

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We are making improvements to the INSPIRE infrastructure this weekend. This will require a short service outage early on Sunday, May 20 2012, around 1am CEST. INSPIRE should be available again within one hour.

The anticipated downtime for different timezones:

  • USA West Coast: 4pm-5pm Saturday evening
  • USA East Coast: 7pm-8pm Saturday evening
  • London (UK): 12am-1am Sunday morning
  • Western Europe: 1am-2am Sunday morning
  • Beijing (CN): 7am-8am Sunday morning
  • Japan: 8am-9am Sunday morning

The scheduled upgrades are aimed at improving responsiveness and resilience of INSPIRE and will provide added capacity for additional services to the community in the future.

Thank you for using INSPIRE and apologies for the inconvenience.

SPIRES and INSPIRE – a brief insight into backend operations

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INSPIRE took over SPIRES frontend services already, SPIRES backend, however, is still running and in partial use in order to get content into INSPIRE as not all of INSPIRE’s backend tools have reached production level yet. While all auxiliary databases except HepNames are already maintained exclusively on INSPIRE, a lot of information for HEP is still generated on SPIRES’ side and updates are sent to INSPIRE several times a day. Bibtex keys are an example and it takes them several hours after the arXiv harvesting to show up on INSPIRE. Citation curation, however, is done on INSPIRE. Furthermore, the theses collection is maintained already completely on INSPIRE and long author lists using author.xml files such as those of the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS are only handled on INSPIRE. Juggling two very different systems does introduce more delays than we would like, but no information is lost and it just might sometimes take a bit longer to appear in this transition phase. If we encounter this, we try to catch up on the information but we might miss some records. So whenever you as a user come across a record which you think is missing important information, we highly appreciate it if you let us know at feedback@inspirehep.net. We’ll not only be able to fix the record, but you’ll be helping us diagnosing glitches in this temporary procedure. We expect to be gradually able to move more and more backend processes to INSPIRE in the next few months, so those inconveniences will disappear.