User-centered design to improve INSPIRE

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As mentioned before, we have started re-designing INSPIRE and your feedback is proving to be precious! Our colleague Robin Colignon will share his thoughts about the importance of usability and how we are using it to improve INSPIRE.

Why is usability important?

If a website is too hard to understand, difficult to use, or the information is not arranged in a logical manner, most of the users feel frustrated and eventually leave and never come back.

Usability concepts cover both the ease of use and learnability of any human-made object, such as a website. Considering usability allows developers and designers to create easy-to-understand interfaces, provide well-organized information, and increase the users’ effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

If you have questions concerning usability, the following website will provide you further information: http://www.usability.gov.

INSPIRE’s new home page

Information architecture tackles the structural design of shared information environments to support findability and usability. Thus, the new information achitecture for INSPIRE focuses on the core functionalities and the content provided.

But before re-designing it we have to understand which ones are the most valuable features for our users; the best way to obtain such information is to ask the community directly.

We ran card sorting tests with our volunteer users, where they could organize the current content of INSPIRE as they thought they should be categorized, highlighted, or excluded. Every tester could group the cards according to their own preferences and provide new names and descriptions.

 

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These insights enlightened us and helped us create a first design interface that takes your needs and requests into account.

Have a look at our first proposal. The mock-up shows how the home page could look like:

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This is just a small teaser! We will be running lots of user tests during our re-design. If you are interested, come back in a few weeks to discover more or join us as a tester. We will be happy to share this experience with you! Contact us at
usability-testing@inspirehep.net.

Robin Colignon is an expert in UX/UI working on the re-design of INSPIRE. He graduated in Information System and Services Science and in Computer Science from the Université de Genève. His interests include user-centered design and interfaces.

Filtering results by country

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Have you ever wanted to search by country of author affiliation in INSPIRE? It can be very helpful to filter laboratories or researchers based in a particular location or to extract your own statistics. We have reintroduced the country search capability, following the SPIRES’ syntax, to enable such queries when an author affiliation is present.

Check these examples; the syntax works using both the country name and the Internet country code:

You can, of course, use it as part of more advanced queries. For example, to find how many experimental papers with Chinese contribution were published in 2013:

And finally, as we know you love statistics as much as we do, these are the most common countries in INSPIRE (extracted the 7th Aug 2014):
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INSPIRE highlights: one-year checkpoint with our Advisory Board

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The INSPIRE Advisory Board meets once a year to hear about progress in the services and feedback from the user community. We recently took stock of progress in our service, its hardware, software, and the new areas we are starting to focus on.

Our Advisory Board counts seven experimental and theoretical physicists from the participating laboratories and the community at large, plus the manager of our sister service NASA Astrophysics Data System. The 2014 meeting took place at Fermilab in May. INSPIRE staff from the five participating laboratories (CERN, DESY, IHEP, Fermilab and SLAC) presented to the Advisory Board an extensive overview of the team’s work during the previous year, along with current challenges and future directions. Among the topics were the organization of our service, the user feedback, the content selection and processing.

The meeting of the INSPIRE Advisory Board is a great opportunity for the INSPIRE team to reflect on the last year’s achievement. We are proud to share some highlights with our entire user community:

  • We made extensive operational improvements to the INSPIRE infrastructure, including new hardware and architecture, major refactoring of the INSPIRE code base, and significant process improvements. While invisible to users, these improvements ensure continuing speed and reliability and allow us to prepare for future development.
  • We mused about future directions for the design of INSPIRE and how to bring together our classic search experience with interaction design and modern web design standards, especially for new services such as author profiles and a more efficient submission of corrections and feedback.
  • We realized how much effort we were able to devote to support open research data. In addition to helping make the ATLAS Higgs likelihood available in a citable way, we also started to link papers to code from GitHub, and integrated third-party data repositories.
  • We reviewed all new content we have been adding to INSPIRE: daily upload of the LHC experimental notes CMS-PAS, ATLAS-CONF, and LHCb-CONF, increased coverage of nuclear physics, and the upload of the PDFs of approximately 10,000 relevant articles from Proceedings of Science, which are now searcheable.
  • We invested additional resources to meet expectations of a timely update of references, authors, and other information of articles we receive from arXiv and beyond. Parts of this process are still manual. During the last year we cleared over 10,000 existing tasks. Our ongoing backlog is now around 1,500 tasks, the lowest in several years. It usually takes us between a day and less than a month to process these tasks.
  • The meeting was an ideal opportunity to welcome IHEP as a new member of the INSPIRE collaboration.

The meeting was an enjoyable, lively exchange, providing lots of food for thought as INSPIRE moves forward.

During the course of our conversations, John Beacom, Advisory Board member, was “impressed with the significant efficiency gains for internal processes and author disambiguation, and strongly encourages further co-operation with ADS to improve coverage of astrophysics and cosmology.”

Our recent efforts in handling experimental data within INSPIRE are being appreciated by the Advisory Board. Kyle Cranmer remarked that “data and code are becoming increasingly important as research products, treating them as first class citizens within INSPIRE is an exciting new direction for the field.” Michelangelo Mangano was “impressed by the rapid response of the INSPIRE team to all suggestions from the community and the Advisory Board, and look[s] forward to continued progress in streamlining the access to the experimental data, also in cooperation with the HEPdata project.”

The INSPIRE Advisory Board is an invaluable source of insight and a trusted representative of the community we serve. Its input, together with the hundreds of e-mails and suggestions we receive from our community make sure that INSPIRE stays true to its course: to be an indispensable service for the High Energy Physics community worldwide.

Incorrect references are now easier to fix

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Spotted incorrect or missing references on INSPIRE? Now it is easier for you to let us know about such things as we simplified our reference correction form.

Here’s how it works: Once you check the references of a paper, the tab offers you an “Update these references link” to update and correct them as needed.

 

Then you have three options. 

  • If there is a revised arXiv version with an updated reference list, you simply need to click this option and submit.
  • If the published version has an updated reference list, in the second step please paste the reference list.
  • If there are some references that have not been correctly identified, please provide detailed corrections in the second step.

In case there are no references added so far, you can just paste the whole reference list in an empty text field.

We’d also appreciate it if you would add a link to a pdf version of the paper. This will make identifying the references much easier and, thus, also much faster. For the first option this is not necessary.

If you have any issues or suggestions about the form, please email us at help@inspirehep.net.

Interested in improving INSPIRE?

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INSPIRE has always relied on your feedback to understand what is significant to you.

In 2013 several hundred INSPIRE users replied to a feedback survey. We learnt a lot on what you find important and what you wish was better. We have already improved things based on your suggestions.

We are now looking for volunteers to test some of the next features on INSPIRE.

Recently we started conducting such usability testing sessions as we want to involve you more in the development.

At this time we are working on face-to-face testing. If you are based at CERN, and are willing to take a moment to contribute, we would be more than happy to hear from you at usability-testing@inspirehep.net

If you are based elsewhere – we will be soon conducting online testing sessions, too. Let us know if you would like to take part: usability-testing@inspirehep.net

Spend your coffee break with us to improve INSPIRE!

 

Topcites 2013 Edition

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We are pleased to announce the 2013 edition of the Topcites lists.

It comes as no surprise that the Higgs discovery papers sit atop the list of topcited articles in 2013. They appear right after the Review of Particle Properties, of course, which has almost twice as many citations. The descriptions of the ATLAS and CMS detectors follow later in the list. Overall it has been an exciting time in experimental physics these past couple of  years; 7 hep-ex papers, 5 from 2012 and 2 from 2011 appear. In addition to the Higgs papers there are 4 neutrino papers and the Heavy Flavor Averaging Group’s report. Keeping with this trend, the list also includes 6 papers on observational  cosmology and one on the search for dark matter.

On the theoretical side the influence of experiment is strongly felt. The 10 topcited hep-ph papers are largely focused on data analysis and simulation. Along with theses goes the original Randall-Sundrum paper on extra dimensions which has been cited by over 300 CERN and Fermilab experimental papers in its lifetime.

In the world of formal theory, 4 of the 5 hep-th papers are the now classic papers on the AdS/CFT correspondence, newly relevant to heavy ion collisions, and the fifth is a review on dark energy.

The recent discovery at CERN makes the 1964 papers of Higgs, Englert and Brout, which won their authors the Nobel Prize for 2013, appear for the second year in a row. The other papers from before the eprint era cover cosmology, black-hole radiation and neutrino mass (including Minkowski’s sleeping beauty).

Twitter feeds and Blogs now listed in HEPNames

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Blogs and Twitter feeds are an increasingly important means of communication for the HEP community. Whether it is the casual thoughts and observations of an individual or the official communications of an experimental collaboration, these modern avenues provide a nice background briefing to help us make sense of the official literature and keep up with the latest developments we may otherwise miss.

Following suggestions from some of you, INSPIRE recognizes the importance of this and we’ve begun to add this information to our records. See HEPNames for a list of links to tweets and blogs from the community, EXPERIMENTS for the Twitter feeds of the collaborations and INSTITUTIONS to keep up with news from your favorite HEP labs. You’ll find these links on the Orange Boxes on the right hand side of INSPIRE.

Do you know of any we’re missing? Contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net.

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INSPIRE adjusts astro-ph selection, all of cosmology is in

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Recently in consultation with our Advisory Board we changed how we select astro-ph articles from arXiv, to optimize collection of the content our community needs.

Since then we have been analysing the results of the new selection process and listening to your feedback. As a result, we are making an important adjustment to the selection policy to better suit your needs.

As of the past Friday, we are again harvesting 100% of astro-ph.CO content. This eliminates the possibility of missing relevant papers. We will soon fill in any cosmology content that was not added to INSPIRE in the past few weeks. We are working to provide the most accurate and comprehensive citation data, so no articles and citations are lost.

INSPIRE will now add content from a subset of astro-ph that is relevant to our community:

  • astro-ph.HE in its entirety
  • astro-ph.CO in its entirety
  • All pre-prints which are cross-listed to astro-ph.HE and astro-ph.CO, as well as astro-ph preprints from other sub-categories which are cross-listed to any of the core INSPIRE categories.
  • As always the case, articles relevant to HEP will be added on a case-by-case basis.

Astro-ph authors should also be aware that because INSPIRE’s focus is HEP, our automated tools are slightly less effective at correctly attributing astro-ph articles to their authors, and extracting all the references.

Consequently, we would like to call on astro-ph authors to ‘claim’ these articles in their profiles (check here) and submit corrections via the reference correction form if any references need improvement.

As always, we will keep an eye on the results, and make sure we are making optimal use of our resources to provide the best service possible for our user community.

We apologize for any confusion or concern during the pilot phase and we are most grateful to the community in supporting the way we adjust our services. We are eager to receive your feedback as we work together to make INSPIRE always better.

The INSPIRE Management Team

INSPIRE service upgrade

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We prepared for a major infrastructure update and roll-out of software improvements. We try to make the switch as seamless as possible. Thus, tomorrow Wednesday 23rd October, from 9 am – 5 pm CEST, INSPIRE will be upgraded. Searching will not be affected. However, other services will not be available during the update. These include job postings, conference submissions and all activities related to the author profile pages.

After this INSPIRE will be back to full and even better service including e.g. new author pages (watch for an upcoming blog post).

Our apologies for the inconvenience this may cause!

The 2013 Nobel prize in Physics awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert

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The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two particle physics theorists – François Englert and Peter W. Higgs today “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

The theorists published their papers independently in 1964 – the first one by François Englert and Robert Brout, and, a month later, a pair of papers by Peter Higgs.

In the graph below you can see the number of citations that each of the papers received yearly since 1964 when they were published, peaking in 2012 with the latest Higgs boson search results.

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Click to enlarge the picture

The theories were confirmed on 4th July 2012, by ATLAS and CMS, the two experiments at the LHC that were searching for the new particle. The two collaborations include more than 3000 people each.

The two papers published shortly after the first evidence presented by the experiments, accumulated enormous numbers of citations in just one year.

About a month ago the ATLAS experiment made the datasets behind the likelihood function associated to the Higgs boson property measurements available to the public in digital format. The datasets can be easily accessed on INSPIRE.

More about the Nobel prize in today’s CERN press release.