Sleeping Beauty

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A sleeping beauty is a paper that slumbers for an extended period of time, attracting few if any citations, until suddenly it awakens and begins to attract many citations. Such a paper is Peter Minkowski’s Physics Letters B article that studied the possibility of lepton family number violation. From its appearance in 1977 until 2003, 26 years later, it received only 17 citations, then it woke in 2004 garnering 46 citations, followed by over 100 in 2005 and amazingly has enjoyed increasing numbers of citations in virtually every year since.

Citation history for INSPIRE record 4994: mu --> e gamma at a Rate of One Out of 1-Billion Muon Decays?

Further information on the citations of Minkowski’s paper can be found at its INSPIRE citation page.

Who knows how many other papers in INSPIRE are similarly biding their time?

Survey results are in!

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A few weeks back, we asked for your feedback on INSPIRE with a short survey. In a week, almost 600 of you helped us out: a great thank you! We learned a lot from you, and we would like to share a short summary of your replies and your suggestions.

You appreciate the speed of INSPIRE, which you find convenient to use and up-to-date. You are pleased that INSPIRE contains all papers relevant to HEP, and you find INSPIRE accurate in terms of author information and stats. You highlighted flexible search options and the variety of export formats, as well as links to arXiv and other sources.

The survey confirmed what we read in your messages: papers’ references and citation counts are most important. We have made a form available for you to correct references and citations, and we are working on making the process easier.

We are also improving how you can ‘claim papers’ and the recognition of special characters in order to refine the author disambiguation.

We are also aware that searching for exact journal articles is sometimes frustrating because of the way INSPIRE treats abbreviations and spaces. We will be working hard on these aspects of searching, as well as on other search suggestions you made. We will keep you posted on this blog and on our Twitter feed.

Our team has made significant progress in enhancing some features that you have mentioned, including ‘self cites’ and extended coverage of HEP-related papers from other fields.

The survey has helped us understand what is important for our users, and we always look forward to receiving your feedback. Feel free to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net.