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.

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?

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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.

We think this is worth sharing: Today the number of INSPIRE HEP records surpassed one million!

Having started with almost 74.000 records on SPIRES in 1974, the HEP database constantly grew over the last years. Day to day we get your arXiv and journal papers in (these were over 33.000 in 2012 alone). And we have much more than that today in INSPIRE: conference proceedings, experimental notes, theses, and also books…

So – thanks for your continuous interest and support during these decades! We are looking forward to decades to come and, as always, we will be more than happy to receive your feedback on our services!

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.

Are you organising a HEP conference or going to attend one and want it to appear on INSPIRE? We now offer a new form to submit conference information to our database. To create an entry, you have to provide your email address and some basic information about the conference such as title, date, country, and city. But of course you can provide even more like URLs to the conference homepage, contact information, a description of the conference or information about the proceedings published afterwards.

Information about conferences announced on the CERN INDICO system will appear automatically. If you want to stay updated about new conferences in the field of HEP, just subscribe to our RSSfeed.

We are looking forward to your submissions. In case you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to write to feedback@inspirehep.net.

Dear INSPIRE blog readers,

I am a HEP arXiv paper and I was recently invited to tell you about my life on INSPIRE. This should help you understand the work the INSPIRE team does and explain why, for example. it may take some time for references to show up. So – here’s what happens to me:

After I first appear on arXiv, it takes INSPIRE about 2 hours to harvest my friends and me. This usually happens at 4 a.m. CET. INSPIRE extracts my plots and indexes my metadata and fulltext which takes about 1-2 hours. When all this is done, I am visible for you users on INSPIRE. In the next step, something called “reference extractor” is run on my PDF and the references it extracts are linked via arXiv number, journal reference, report number or DOI to corresponding existing INSPIRE records where they are counted as citations.

The main curation for my data – excluding references – is still done on SPIRES, and this will probably continue for the next 2 months. So later in the day, my INSPIRE record will be overwritten by the SPIRES record which will add the BibTeX key to my metadata.

Based solely on author names, I will be assigned to likely author profiles. The next day, I will be assigned standardized keywords which will be improved by physicists in the following weeks.

Since there’s a high chance I might be revised within my first week on arXiv, there will be no human curation on my record on INSPIRE during this time. Any revised version during this period will completely overwrite my record and my references will be re-extracted. After this embargo period, my metadata will be thoroughly curated: title, author names and references are corrected. Affiliations, report numbers, collaboration and experiment names are added. If I am a conference paper, the record will be linked to the corresponding entry in the conference database. Missing or wrong references can be added or corrected by you as INSPIRE users via a web interface. Using the additional information on affiliations, co-authors and collaboration names the algorithmic matching of my author profiles will be refined. If I should be assigned to a wrong author, my authors can claim me as their own through a web interface.

After a few months as an arXiv paper on INSPIRE, I will most likely be published in a journal or conference proceedings. I will then be included in the feeds publishers give to INSPIRE, which are matched against INSPIRE records based on title and author names. Here it is important to have human intervention as my title, or even my authors, might be modified. Matching records are merged and publication note and DOI or a link to the publisher web page are added to my INSPIRE record. Citations I gain are from now on based on both my arXiv ID and publication note.

For my relatives – papers from other sources like non-hep* arXiv categories, journals, conference proceedings, thesis servers – life on INSPIRE is a little bit more complicated. First the ones relevant for HEP have to be selected; this is done semi-automatically with the aid of a script identifying core keywords in the fulltext. Then subject categories have to be assigned to them. If they are of immediate relevance to High Energy Physics, they are considered as so called “core” papers for the database and go through the same hand curation as me.

The INSPIRE team is constantly working on improving this workflow and adding new tools to make the process faster. And they are very happy to respond to the questions and comments you send to feedback@inspirehep.net.

I hope you liked this short insight into my life.

Enjoy working with INSPIRE!
Your HEP arXiv paper

The large collaborations at the LHC have an unusual intermediate form of publication: the conference note.  These are significant results prepared by the collaboration for major international conferences (not to be confused with proceedings written by a conference attendee).  They are  heavily peer-reviewed within the collaboration, signed by the collaboration as a whole, and often precede submission to a journal.  Moreover, these conference notes typically provide more detail than the documents submitted for publication, which makes them particularly valuable to anyone following the research closely.

However, finding these conference notes has confounded almost everyone that has looked for them.  They are “catalogued” in a maze of wiki pages, plain HTML pages, and various categories in the CERN document server (CDS).  While CDS is based on the same underlying Invenio technology, it lacks much of the functionality that INSPIRE offers.  In particular, there has been no way to easily navigate references, track citations, or generate bibliographic information.

This situation improved dramatically when both ATLAS and CMS agreed to put these conference notes into INSPIRE.  There are already more than 800 conference notes indexed, with many more to come!

For example, you can find the ATLAS conference notes with
find r atlas-conf-*
and the CMS Physics Analysis Summaries (PAS) with
find r cms-pas-*

Now, I can easily track citations to a recent conference note on the Higgs decaying to photons; perform a full text search for the word “asymptotic“; and see which ATLAS conference notes have been cited by CERN theorist Christophe Grojean.

As an author of several of these conference notes, I am particularly excited about the ability to generate standard bibliography entries.  For example, I can easily export a .bib file for all the 2012 ATLAS conference notes.  This will be a huge time savings for the collaborations and a great example of the impact an excellent literature database can have!

Datasets from HepData are now integrated into INSPIRE. HepData is a data repository hosted at Durham University which aggregates data extracted from publications in HEP and other datasets made available by the experiments. The data is presented in tables and available as data files for further reuse (plain format on INSPIRE; more formats are available on HepData). With the integration of HepData into INSPIRE, you can access data sets from HepData directly when browsing bibliographical records. If a record on INSPIRE has data from HepData attached, a corresponding tab is displayed next to the references and citation tabs. About 50,000 data files attached to about 7,000 records are available which are stored as regular records in INSPIRE. Datasets from 2012 e.g. can be found here.

What do you think about this new feature included in INSPIRE? We are looking forward to your feedback at feedback@inspirehep.net.