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.

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