What are we doing?
Starting August 2026, new records across INSPIRE will use only the parent-form of the institution name, e.g., “Harvard U. (main)” instead of “Harvard U., Dept. Math.” or “Cambridge U. (main)” instead “Cambridge U., DAMTP”. Eventually, once the clean-up has been completed, the “(main)” will be dropped and the final form of the name will be, e.g., “Harvard U.”.
Why are we doing this?
The somewhat inconsistent granularity of INSPIRE institution records dates back to the SPIRES days, when SLAC would send announcements of each week’s preprints through postal mail to institutions around the world. To do this, the mail needed to be addressed at the department level, and so the Physics department was the default for each institution’s record. To cover scientists who were in other departments, additional institution records would be created for, e.g., Mathematics departments.
Over time records proliferated in an unsustainable way as more people wanted their particular department added and as departments changed names and universities added centers, institutes and other sub-units. This often led to precision without accuracy as catalogers would misidentify the sub-unit and authors themselves would not be consistent about what they used for their affiliation.
In the era of automation, this problem became increasingly acute as the more choices there were, the greater possibility for errors that would then propagate across hundreds of records. This also produces complications for author identification as the same person may appear, meaninglessly, at different sub-units.
Having only one record for each institution simplifies things and allows INSPIRE to concentrate on producing accurate records and author identification.