Melissa Clegg – INSPIRE-HEP Blog

31Mar 2023

Snowmass 2021

by Melissa Clegg

The Proceedings of the 2021 US Community Study on the Future of Particle Physics (Snowmass 2021) is now available at https://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C210711/ .

Snowmass is a series of meetings that take place every few years, during which the US particle physics community discusses the future of the field with regards to the science, technology, infrastructure, and people. The conclusions of these discussions serve as community input for the strategic plan of US high energy physics research. See Chris Quigg’s paper How to Snowmass for more information about the philosophy of the Snowmass meetings.

INSPIRE gives access to historical Snowmass meetings on the planning of the future of particle physics in the US. To find past proceedings, go to INSPIRE conferences and search for series.name:”SNOWMASS”.

30Jan 2023

Unexpected downtime

by Melissa Clegg

We apologize for the unexpected downtime of INSPIRE over the past weekend. The site is not generally staffed on weekends, so it took us longer than usual to identify and fix the issue.

Thank you to all our users for bringing the problems with the site to our attention. INSPIRE is now back to normal, and we are taking steps to prevent the same issue from happening in the future.

22Aug 2022

Full-text search

by Melissa Clegg

Full-text searching is now available in Literature for more than 710,000 records that have PDF files stored in INSPIRE. To use this type of search, be sure to include either the operator “ft” or “fulltext” before the word or phrase you want to search, e.g.:

It can be combined with our other index terms, e.g. a penrose and ft twistor.

Phrase searching is also available, e.g. ft “Chiral Symmetry Breaking”.

Screenshot of results for a literature search for [ ft "Chiral Symmetry Breaking" ] in INSPIRE

The first record returned by this search does not include the phrase “chiral symmetry breaking” in the title or abstract, but rather within the text of the paper.

Cropped screenshot of a paragraph of text in a pdf paper. The words "chiral symmetry breaking" are highlighted in green.

Note that full-text search cannot be performed on records for which full-text is unavailable on INSPIRE. The database indexes the metadata of some papers and books for which we do not have access to a pdf. Additionally, leaving out the search operators will only search the metadata of records, such as titles, abstracts, authors, etc. Compare the results of fulltext “quark decay” with the results of “quark decay”.

For feature requests, please fill in your feedback here. For any other request, you can contact us at <feedback@inspirehep.net>.

23Jul 2019

IN2P3 Joins INSPIRE

by Melissa Clegg

The INSPIRE team is glad to announce that the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3) has joined the INSPIRE collaboration. IN2P3 is the sixth institute to contribute to this global effort at the service of the worldwide High-Energy Physics community, alongside CERN, DESY, Fermilab, IHEP and SLAC.

IN2P3 is one of the ten institutes of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and represents 20 laboratories in France, 1000 permanent researchers and 1500 supporting staff, as well as 600 postdocs and PhD students. IN2P3 has already participated in INSPIRE activities since 2016, through a bilateral collaboration agreement with CERN, and a formal accession as INSPIRE partner has now been signed.

For years IN2P3 has brought enthusiastic and substantial support to open science. IN2P3 librarians (“Democrite” network) have been among the very first to massively and systematically deposit publications on the French open archive HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne). From now on, the Democrite team is directly curating publications relevant to IN2P3 on INSPIRE, and after validation, these are automatically pushed to HAL (by SWORD protocol). Thanks to the IN2P3 open science policy and promotion, the vast majority of these records in HAL already have a direct link to an open access version, and HAL will soon be able to automatically obtain, display and archive the PDF versions of these documents. Since 2016, already 10,000 records have been treated through this process, with an average of 4,000 records per year, where half of them have IN2P3 authors and the other half have at least one French author. Thus, IN2P3 voluntarily supports the whole French physics community.

The IN2P3 team of curators brings to INSPIRE its knowledge of French affiliations and direct support of requests from French authors. They participate in the author disambiguation and publication attribution effort for French authors and can manually add content relevant to IN2P3 to INSPIRE. The very high quality of metadata in INSPIRE also allows them to extract reliable and refined metrics for the Institute. In France, they maintain a network of IN2P3 researchers to promote best practices for international visibility of their works (arXiv use, ORCID, etc.) and liaise with the other CNRS and CEA institutes interested in their contributions.

This partnership shows well that direct connections between a major international scientific information system, such as INSPIRE, and national or institutional archives are increasingly possible, facilitated by the generalization of common international identifiers (affiliations, authors, etc.) and voluntary open science policies.

– Mathieu Grives
IN2P3

23Jan 2017

INSPIRE Annual Topcites 2016

by Melissa Clegg

The 2016 edition of the annual topcites list is still very much dominated by experiment, in particular the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, with the ATLAS and CMS papers at the [1] and [2] positions as they have been since 2013 (joined by the ATLAS and CMS instrumentation papers [12,13]). Indeed, they have now cracked the top ten of the all time list, where they are the only papers from the 2010s and, together with the 2006 PYTHIA [4] and 2002 GEANT4 [6] papers, the only papers from this century. The ATLAS and CMS collaborations produced a joint paper in 2015 on the Higgs boson mass and it makes its first appearance in the Top Forty this year [32]. The papers from the 1990s on the AdS/CFT correspondence [5,14,20] continue to be strongly represented. A breakthrough paper from 2006 by Ryu and Takayanagi [39], which connects entanglement entropy and Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, has made its first appearance in the Top Forty list as interest grows in the connection between quantum information concepts and quantum gravity. Aside from these papers, all of the theoretical papers in the top twenty are resource papers centered around LHC-relevant simulations [4,6,7,8,9,16,19]. The 21st century simulation codes Sherpa and POWHEG make their first appearance on the Top Forty list this year [35,38] following a long, steady climb in their annual citation rates [2008 paper, 2004 paper]. Away from the LHC-zone, observational cosmology rules the top twenty, with familiar favorites [3,10,15,17,18] and one very important newcomer [11], to which we now turn.

The gravitational wave discovery paper [11] by the LIGO Scientific and Virgo collaborations appeared simultaneously in Physical Review Letters and on arXiv.org in February. By April it had 200 citations and by July 500 citations. In late December Science Magazine named this discovery the Breakthrough of the Year for 2016. So far this seems to have exerted little influence on the rest of the topcite list (though one can detect an uptick in citations of Einstein’s original GR paper and his 1937 paper on gravitational waves). It will be interesting to see what happens in 2017.

The other big news of 2016 was the possible di-photon (or gamma-gamma) excess reported in December of 2015 by ATLAS [24] and CMS [29] in papers that were, unprecedentedly for the Top Forty list, neither arXiv eprints nor journal articles. As a potential signal for New Physics, this precipitated an intense period of research. The observations generated more than 400 theory papers citing the ATLAS and CMS reports. This collection of theory papers acquired a Hirsh index of 92, that is 92 of these citing papers themselves garnered at least 92 citations. Publishing these theory papers was a matter of controversy. JHEP declined for some time to publish any theory paper explaining the resonance; Physical Review Letters chose four to illustrate the ferment in the particle theory community. Finally at the ICHEP conference in Chicago in August it was announced that the signal disappeared when studied in the larger LHC data set accumulated in 2016. In the still-relevant words of Maurice Goldhaber, “not all candidates get elected”.

The remainder of the list includes familiar papers from previous Top Forty lists. On the theory side are more LHC-relevant simulation papers [22,23,25,28,30,31], Hawking radiation [21], inflation [26,34], large extra dimensions [33] and neutrino mixing [37]. The list is rounded out by the first resullts from LUX on dark matter [27] (the final results from LUX appeared in August, too late for this edition) and the update of cosmological parameters from the full WMAP data set [36].

– Heath O’Connell and Michael Peskin.

23Mar 2016

DOIs and Lattice QCD gauge ensemble datasets

by Melissa Clegg

Traditionally DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have been associated with published papers in the digital era, but papers are not the only research objects that physicists may want to search, use, and cite. We talked with Jim Simone of Fermilab about his efforts to get DOIs assigned to MILC collaboration datasets and to get records of them uploaded to INSPIRE.

How is Jim involved with the MILC collaboration?

Jim is a member of FERMILAB-LATTICE collaboration, which works closely with MILC on scientific projects involving matrix elements and flavor physics. MILC generates data sets consisting of lattice gauge configuration files, which the collaboration has made openly available for others to use, as is increasingly becoming required for federally funded research in the U.S.

What is the MILC collaboration’s connection to the International Lattice Data Grid (ILDG)?

Jim was an early organizer of the ILDG, which is intended as a data grid to enable collaborations to share gauge configurations. The ILDG metadata catalog had its limitations; it only held limited kinds of metadata, sometimes making it difficult for people to find what they were looking for. People involved with the project have been trying to fill in the gaps, including the biggest problem: connecting scientific papers produced by the data to the datasets.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, ILDG is considering to use INSPIRE as a catalog to connect papers with datasets, making the data usable and findable by all physicists, including HEP and nuclear phenomenologists, as ILDG is currently only used by lattice scientists. In INSPIRE the datasets and associated papers can be searched starting with the papers in order to see what configurations were used to get the results, though in the upcoming version of INSPIRE, the Data collection will be made public and searching will also be possible starting with the individual datasets and from there finding what papers were produced from these configurations.

_{INSPIRE record of MILC dataset that has been cited. http://dx.doi.org/10.15484/milc.asqtad.en05b/1178157}

_{References in INSPIRE record of a paper that cited MILC datasets.}

Why and how did Jim go about getting DOIs assigned to the datasets? What challenges did he face?

Jim believes DOIs, as public, persistent identifiers, are a natural mechanism to identify the datasets, which are public, first class data objects, and permanent. With DOIs, the configurations will be better integrated into the ILDG and INSPIRE.

In the case of published papers, DOIs are assigned by publishers, but this route would not work for datasets. While INSPIRE is equipped to directly issue DOIs, MILC’s direct connection to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) made it practical for DOIs to be issued by DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). In either case, DOIs are registered with the central agency DataCite.

ILDG has started a discussion on how other groups can get DOIs for their datasets. Outside the DOE, CERN also issues DOIs, and regional ILDG groups can help members get DOIs and serve as gatekeepers to keep the metadata clean and clear. DataCite can also help researchers find registration organizations.

For Jim it was a learning experience working with OSTI and interacting with their web services. As one of his main focuses was findability, Jim wanted to include lots of searchable metadata in the dataset records so to help physicists find the particular configurations they wanted. This amount of metadata was more than OSTI was used to receiving when minting DOIs, but they were able to work with Jim’s requests and he considered them a great help through the entire process

Beyond getting the DOIs assigned, another challenge was figuring out how citations should be marked up in papers, both written and digitally. With the goals of making the datasets findable and identifiable, Jim and the ILDG wanted people to be able to see the DOI in a print version of a reference list as well as click it in a digital version. In order to make the process as transparent as possible for people citing the datasets, Jim worked with us to include instructions in the metadata of the INSPIRE records and OSTI records.

For researchers unsure of how to cite datasets that do not include specific citation guidelines in their metadata, DataCite and CrossRef have developed a DOI citation formatter that can take a DOI registered by either of these services and format its citation in a variety of styles.

When going through the publication process with a paper that used MILC configurations, Jim found the referees and copy editors weren’t familiar with how the citations should appear. Most objects with a DOI are published papers that can be cited in written format using a journal reference, volume, page range, etc., so the DOI is often left out of the text of a reference list. However, following this standard would not make the datasets adequately identifiable to the human eye.

The community known as FORCE 11 (Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) has developed eight principles of data citation practices with equal emphasis on human readability and machine-actionability. As these recommendations become more widely endorsed in research communities and researchers become accustomed to citing datasets in their papers, the issue of human identifiable data citations will most likely be resolved.

What advice does Jim have for others looking to make their datasets more findable and citable?

Jim has two pieces of advice: get DOIs and mark up the metadata in a way that’s sensible for the community who will use the datasets. DataCite makes this simple by being explicit about its mandatory metadata requirements, while also allowing for additional recommended and optional metadata.

At INSPIRE we look forward to integrating more dataset DOIs into our records. Send your questions and comments about dataset DOIs in INSPIRE to feedback@inspirehep.net.

03Mar 2016

2015年度高被引文章概览 (Topcites 2015 edition)

by Melissa Clegg

一年一度的INSPIRE高被引文章列表（INSPIRE Topcites）对上一年度的热点话题提供了概览。为了保证专注于高能物理领域，我们发布的这份列表中仅考虑来自核心文章的被引次数。为了确保覆盖面的广度，我们还针对每一个arXiv的类别给出了高被引文献列表。

除了列表中间的几篇文章和最后几篇有关量子涨落的经典文章，2015年40篇高被引文章列表延续了近期的趋势，与上一年度基本一致。2014年的前五篇文章依然在今年的高被引文章列表中，今年排位第五【5】的由Maldacena在1997年发表的有关AdS/CFT的文章比排位第六【6】的在2002年发表的描述GEANT4的文章（这篇文章去年排名第七），多了近150次的被引频次。

列表中出现的第一篇新文章位列第七【7】，这是一篇讲宇宙学参数普朗克的文章，是基于发表于2013年普朗克文章【3】的最新研究成果。自从这篇文章在2015年2月发表之后，被引频次超过700，这样，有关普朗克的文章在列表中总共有4篇。2015年2月还有一篇有关膨胀的文章【27】，也是基于发表于2013年一篇文章【30】更新后的研究成果。

第15位是我们的列表中新出现的第二篇文章【15】，发表于2014年，是发表于2011年MadGraph5文章【16】的后续，它描述了自动计算，微扰理论的次领头阶的软件包。

提交至arXiv.org名单上的论文中，有11篇来自hep-ph领域，4 篇来自hep-th，当然，还有两篇发现希格斯的论文是来自hep-ex领域，另外有10 篇来自astro-ph领域（8篇来自astro-ph.CO领域和两篇发表于1998年的关于超新星的文章【10，13】，如果这两篇文章撰写的时候有astro-ph.CO的子类别，那么这两篇文章就会被归属于这个类别）。astro-ph类别里都是观测类文章，因此我们能看出理论和“实验性”论文的数量大致相当。发表于数字化时代之前的有关粒子物理和宇宙学的经典论文，却是由于近代的科学研究和发现出现在了高被引文章列表中。有趣的是，从这些文章年度被引用频次的图表中都能看出明显的上升趋势。

	[39]		[37]		[33]		[32]
	[31]		[26]		[20]		[23]

Read the post in English here.

05Feb 2016

Topcites 2015 edition

by Melissa Clegg

INSPIRE Matrix of Topcites

The annual INSPIRE Topcites list provides a snapshot of the topics that were of greatest interest in a given calendar year. To maintain the focus on HEP, we construct the list by considering only citations from core papers. To be complete, we also provide individual Topcite lists for each arXiv category we cover.

Continuing a recent trend, the 2015 Top 40 list is virtually unchanged from the previous year, save for a little re-shuffling in the middle order and the quantum fluctuations of classic papers near the bottom. The leading five papers from 2014 securely held their positions, with almost 150 citations separating Maldacena’s 1997 AdS/CFT paper at number [5] from this year’s number [6] paper, the 2002 GEANT4 description paper (which itself was seventh last year).

The first new paper on the list appears at number [7], a Planck paper on cosmological parameters that updates the results of a 2013 Planck paper [3]. Since its posting in February 2015 this paper has collected over 700 citations and brings to four the total number of Planck papers on the list, including another February 2015 paper on inflation [27] which, again, updates a 2013 paper [30].

At number [15] we have the second paper making its debut, a 2014 descendant of the 2011 MadGraph5 paper [16], describing a software package for automatically calculating cross sections at next-to-leading order.

Of the papers on the list submitted to arXiv.org, 11 were from hep-ph, 4 from hep-th, the 2 Higgs discovery papers were, of course, from hep-ex and 10 were from astro-ph (8 from astro-ph.CO and the two 1998 supernova papers [10, 13] that would have been in astro-ph.CO if this subcategory had existed when they were written). The astro-ph papers are all observational, so we see a roughly equal number of theoretical and “experimental” papers. The classic papers from before the digital age, however, are all theoretical works on particle physics and cosmology that have been summoned to the list by recent research and discovery. Interestingly, the charts of their annual citation counts all show an impressively upward trajectory:

	[39]		[37]		[33]		[32]
	[31]		[26]		[20]		[23]

suggesting a strong showing by them in future topcite lists.

– Heath O’Connell (Fermilab)

13Jan 2015

Topcites 2014 edition

by Melissa Clegg

In the world of topcited papers, 2014 looked a lot like 2013 and not just because the Review of Particle Physics is once again at the top. The effects of 2012’s discovery of the Higgs boson continued to be strongly felt and many of the related papers from the 2013 topcite list appeared again in more or less the same position. Along with the discovery papers themselves [1,2], the original theory papers [34,35] and the detector description papers [17,19], a host of papers relevant to event simulation at the LHC [4,7,9,12,14,20,22,28,31] have featured prominently; interestingly, the PYTHIA paper [4] is now the first paper from the 2000s in the All Time Topcite list. The AdS/CFT papers [5,10,16] and Randall-Sundrum [26] continue their 15+ year run on the Topcite list. Planck [3], WMAP [11,24] and the 1998 supernova cosmology papers [13,15] again represent observational cosmology on the list.

So what was new this year? The March announcement [6] by BICEP2 of the results of a search for inflationary gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background had an immediate impact and the paper had 100 citations within two weeks and 500 by July. This got people thinking about inflation and brought back a number of inflation papers from the 1980s to the topcite list [23,29,36,37] in addition to Guth’s perennial paper [21], which climbed twelve places in the rankings, and the Planck inflation paper [8], which climbed twenty one.

The remaining inductees were the October 2013 LUX constraints on dark matter paper [18] (that joined the similar XENON100 paper [27]) and the March 2013 Planck overview paper [38].

Rounding out the list were the electron antineutrino disappearance papers [30,33], Hawking’s black hole radiation paper [25], the dark energy review of Copeland et al. [32] and Minkowski’s sleeping beauty [39].

-Heath O’Connell

29Sep 2014

Rawref searching

by Melissa Clegg

Ever wanted to just cut and paste a reference from a paper in INSPIRE and find the corresponding paper? We have worked hard to try to make this possible. You have two ways to do it:

Note that you must put your search in quotations when using rawref. However, you can omit the year when searching this way, e.g. find rawref “JHEP 1202 068”. Correct spacing is also not necessary, thus rawref:”Phys. Rev. D 90 064027″ and rawref:”Phys.Rev. D90 064027″ will yield the same result.

Any journal name variant listed in INSPIRE will work with rawref. You can find these variants by searching for a journal name in the Journal section of INSPIRE. Click the name for the detailed record, and then click the link for “Show name variants”.

namevariants Journal record for Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research