We are excited to announce INSPIRE beta, a sneak peek into the future of INSPIRE!
Built on top of a modern and reliable software architecture, INSPIRE beta aims at bringing the best out of the existing INSPIRE features while introducing new ones.
The High Energy Physics community’s feedback has always been part of shaping and improving INSPIRE; by launching INSPIRE beta to the community we enable an even closer connection, which helps us to deliver a new and better INSPIRE platform based on user needs.
That’s why INSPIRE beta is running in parallel to INSPIRE, while we work on ensuring that it will fully satisfy the needs of the HEP community. For the time being, users need to login via ORCID in order to try out INSPIRE beta, but the final platform will be available to everyone without any login required, same as the current INSPIRE platform.
You will see a powerful search, new filters (facets), and a new look-and-feel of search results and author pages.
Feel free to dive in, try out INSPIRE beta and tell us what you like and what we should improve via this feedback form.
What’s new
Search
INSPIRE beta features the familiar SPIRES syntax operators, currently the most popular way of searching in INSPIRE. According to our usage data, 95% of user searches correspond to the 10 most popular SPIRES syntax operators, as illustrated here:
This was a clear indication for us when deciding our search implementation priorities. In the future, we will review the implementation based on user feedback, but for now, the following SPIRES syntax operators are supported on INSPIRE beta:
| Search by | Use operators | Example |
| Author name | a, au, author, name | a witten |
| Author BAI | a, au, author, name | a J.M.Maldacena.1 |
| Title | t, title, ti | t A First Course in String Theory |
| Eprint | eprint | eprint 1605.03630 |
| Exact author name | ea, exactauthor, exact-author | ea ellis, j |
| Document type (type-code) | tc, type-code, type, ty | For thesis: tc t |
| Date | d,date, year | d 2015+ |
| Citation number | topcite,topcit, cited | topcite 1000+ |
| Collaboration | cn, collaboration | cn babar |
| Journal | j, journal, coden, published_in | j Nucl.Phys.,B164,171 |
| Number of authors | ac,author-count, authorcount | ac 1->10 |
| Report number | r,reportnumber, report-num, report, rept, rn | r ATLAS-CONF-2011-084 |
| Citations of a record | refersto:recid | refersto:recid:193978 |
| Texkey | texkey | texkey Lutz:2003jw |
| DOI | doi | doi 10.1088/1475-7516/2013/05/009 |
| Record id | recid, control_number | recid:193978 |
In addition, we are investigating new ways to search for information using free text. We are currently improving the search results so that users can search by typing any combination of author names, title, dates etc. For example:
Filtering
The new facets allow users to refine their search. You can search by date, author name, subject, arXiv category, experiment and document type. Additionally, following user requests, we added a new facet to filter out papers with more than 10 authors. The facet works similarly to the author count SPIRES operator (ac 1->10).
Citation counts
Citations are a very core function of what we do; INSPIRE aggregates content from many sources with often updated references. Currently, INSPIRE has 4 different algorithms for calculating citations, which can lead to discrepancies. In INSPIRE beta we implemented a new algorithm to calculate stable and accurate citations. So what does that mean for you? As we are still fine tuning the algorithm, you might encounter small citation differences between the two systems.
What’s next
For more info on new features and known issues, please visit our help page.