INSPIRE blog now also available in Chinese!

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The INSPIRE service is operated by a global consortium, including IHEP in Beijing , We strive to connect the global High-Energy Physics (HEP) community, indexing over 1.000.000 relevant publications and offering accurate author profiles with citation statistics. . To celebrate our global reach, and serve the diversity of our community, some of our blog posts relevant to the Chinese HEP community will also appear in Chinese on our pages.

Let us know what you think about this and check out INSPIRE-HEP blog and twitter for more news. Our Chinese colleagues can also check our China Weibo micro-blog

New self-cite search syntax

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Citation metrics are one of the most used features on INSPIRE. We are always looking for ways to enhance the options to search through citations and references.
We introduced three new search terms you can use to refine your search results and exclude self citations:

Note that ‘M.E.Peskin.1’ is an authorID.

If you have more requests for search syntax that might make your life easier, take a look at our search guide and tips and don’t hesitate to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net

For more helpful tips and information about our features follow INSPIRE’s blog and tweets.

Proceedings of Science Fulltexts

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Have you noticed something new about Proceedings of Science articles on INSPIRE-HEP? All of these records now have their fulltexts uploaded with searchable pdfs and references extracted. That’s over 10,000 articles!

PoS_screenshot

Because PoS, which is organized by the International School for Advanced Studies based in Trieste, Italy (SISSA), is an Open Access proceedings collection, INSPIRE is free to distribute its content to all users. You can find out more about PoS from its website: http://pos.sissa.it/POSwhat.html

The field of HEP is making some big moves in the direction of Open Access this year. Keep an eye out for even more fulltext content on INSPIRE in the near future.

Are you still learning how to search in INSPIRE? Here are three ways to take a look at the PoS records we have:

  • In Journals, search for Proceedings of Science orpos.

    journal_pos1

    Click on the journal title, and then click the link for “Articles in HEP”.

    journal_pos2

  • Using SPIRES-style searching type find j pos in the simple search (default search) box.

    journal_pos3

  • Using Invenio-style searching type journal:pos in the simple search box.

    search_pos01

More tips for searching in specific journals can be found here: https://old.inspirehep.net/help/search-tips#journals

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

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.

Higgs-Nobel-plot-revised-final
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.

Changes: coverage of astro-ph preprints in INSPIRE

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The Astronomy, Astrophysics and HEP communities have long relied on arXiv, ADS and INSPIRE for their communication. ADS has been tailored to the needs of the Astronomy and Astrophysics communities, and INSPIRE emerges from the HEP community. All three communities use arXiv to distribute preprints.

INSPIRE currently lists all astro-ph preprints appearing in arXiv. However, most of them are not immediately relevant to the HEP community and we do not provide additional services such as author disambiguation, affiliations, reference curation, conference information, etc. for these preprints.

Starting on the 1st of October, INSPIRE will only add a relevant subset of astro-ph:

  1. astro-ph.HE [High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena] in its entirety, including cross-listings
  2. For the rest of astro-ph, as for all other arXiv subcategories outside the CORE categories (see http://inspirehep.net/info/hep/collection-policy), we will take eprints cross-listed to the CORE categories.
  3. We will also take care to cover articles on dark matter and dark energy, as well as articles by the Planck Collaboration. Other articles relevant to HEP will be added on a case-by-case basis. For example, in the astro-ph.CO category [Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics], roughly 50% of the publications are HEP-related and will be added to INSPIRE.

We hope this will make it easier for users to find relevant content. Our friends at ADS will continue to be the natural port of call for those users who need a deeper analysis of Astronomy and Astrophysics content, and we are working behind the scenes to better integrate the services of our two systems.

The Higgs discovery seen from within INSPIRE: one year on.

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Exactly one year ago, on July 4th 2012, ATLAS and CMS presented evidence for a new particle behaving like the long-sought-after Higgs boson.

By the end of the month, two papers from ATLAS and CMS were published describing this discovery. Unsurprisingly, they rapidly accumulated an enormous number of more than 1000 citations in less than a year. Below is a graph of the distribution of the citations that the two papers have gathered until now. These counts include an INSPIRE ‘speciality’: we take into account the references to both version of a work: the published article and the arXiv preprint.

To look at this in context: among the million records in INSPIRE, only 512 papers so far have passed the 1000 citations mark. Of course, several of those describe major discoveries, such as the W and Z bosons, the top quark, and the ‘November revolution’ J/psi meson papers.

In their first year, the articles announcing the W and Z boson discoveries received a total of over 600 citations, while the two ‘November Revolution’ papers (BNL and SLAC) collected a total of around 1100 citations. The top quark discovery papers by Fermilab gathered a total of 1200 citations in one year.

For comparison, the highest-cited paper ever is Maldacena’s famous paper on the connection between string theory and quantum field theory, now closing in on 10,000 citations. It received just under 500 citations in its first year.

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?

Check your references before you submit to arXiv!

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Planning to submit a paper to arXiv? Now you can make sure that your references will show up correctly on INSPIRE before you submit your paper to arXiv or a journal. With our reference extraction tool, you can simulate the reference extraction on INSPIRE by uploading a PDF file, giving us the URL to fetch it or just pasting a list of reference in the text box. As a result you get the reference list as it would appear on INSPIRE and you can check and modify the references we would not match correctly to other papers in INSPIRE. Matching to records on INSPIRE works best when you cite:

  • journal article references such as Nucl.Phys. B869 (2013) 598-607;
  • arXiv identifiers, e.g. arXiv:1301.0223 [hep-th];
  • report numbers such as LPT-ENS-12-47; as well as
  • DOIs, e.g. 10.1142/S0217751X13500334.

Creating your reference list with the help of our LaTeX and BibTeX output formats increases the likelihood that references are extracted and linked correctly. If this fails, we most likely don’t have the paper you’re citing in our database. You might then want to suggest us to add it to INSPIRE if the paper is of immediate relevance to HEP.

The tool also works for papers you have already submitted to arXiv if you just provide us with the arXiv identifier. We are constantly working on improving refextract and it should also recognise theses or selected conference series in the future.

If you have more suggestions for useful tools we could provide, don’t hesitate to let us know at feedback@inspirehep.net.

INSPIRE increases coverage of nuclear physics

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As with astrophysics, the connection between nuclear physics and high energy physics has recently been growing closer, an example of which is the string theory implications of heavy ion collision experiments. The annual topcite list for 2011 contains two nucl-ex papers and in the lifetime of arXiv, over 200 nucl-ex eprints have been cited by hep-th eprints and 100 hep-th eprints have been cited by nucl-ex eprints.

Although  INSPIRE has long provided coverage of nuclear physics, for example by including the nucl-ex and nucl-th eprints as well as everything published in Physical Review C and Physics Letters B, we can now expand this service in order to provide the HEP community with a fuller picture of research at the borders of our core interest. Starting in 2013, we are now including complete coverage of all articles in journals relevant to the intersection of HEP and nuclear physics: European Physical Journal A, International Journal of Modern Physics E, Journal of Physics G and Nuclear Physics A. While we will continue focusing our  resources on the curation of HEP articles we will periodically curate the titles and author lists of these new additions.