Everything about our new Suggestion Forms

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As you might have read in our previous blog post, the new INSPIRE Labs website is the place where we will deploy and let you test new features.

Let us show you one of our new features: check out the Suggestion Forms on Labs!

Do you know about any publication (articles, proceedings, thesis) that is not on INSPIRE but could be an interesting addition? You can help us by letting us know about it via our new suggestion form. We will be happy to review it and include the content as soon as possible if it falls within our collection policy.

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Fig 1: Submit publications automatically

To make it simple, we included an automatic import tool (Fig. 1). If you enter an arXiv number and/or a DOI to the form, INSPIRE Labs will automatically pre-fill as much publication information as possible.

You can also fill out or complete it manually (Fig. 2). Only a few fields are mandatory, but the more information you provide us, the more useful it would be for the readers. It is particularly important that the Author fields contain all the co-authors who wrote the publication, with each name in a separate input field, one on each line.

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Fig 2: Submit publications manually

All the suggestions received will be reviewed by our team manually, to verify the content and complete the information following INSPIRE standards. This procedure can take a few days. Once the submission is approved, you will receive a confirmation e-mail and it will appear automatically in INSPIRE as a temporary record that will probably get further curation afterwards. Moreover, please do not worry if some processes like reference extraction and indexing may take some time.

You can find more information about how to use our suggestion form in our Help page.

We hope that you will find this new feature useful. As always, we are waiting for your feedback. You can send us an e-mail or try out the new Send Feedback widget on the right side of every INSPIRE Labs page. Let us know what you think about our new forms!

Rawref searching

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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:

rawref1Note 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”.

namevariantsJournal record for Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research

Rawref:”Nucl.Instrum.Meth. A584 (2008) 75″, rawref:”Nucl. Inst. and Meth. Phys. Res. A584 (2008) 75″, and rawref:”NIM A584 (2008) 75″ are all valid searches.

If you just paste a reference in the search bar without ‘find rawref’, INSPIRE-HEP will try to guess what paper you are looking for.

journalhintJHEP 1202 (2012) 068

 Please contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net if you have any comments or suggestions for improving INSPIRE.

Updating DOIs in arXiv

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Usually we add DOIs and update INSPIRE to reflect the fact that articles are published within a few weeks of publication. This information is taken from feeds INSPIRE receives from publishers. We try to find the corresponding preprint in a semi-automatic way and add the publication information. Sometimes this process is delayed or fails. If after waiting patiently for updates you do believe there is a failure in the process, please let us know, as other articles might be affected as well.

But did you know that the quickest way to add a DOI and journal publication information to preprints in INSPIRE is to update them in arXiv? While this may seem like an indirect method, authors have direct control over their papers on arXiv (via paper password) and can easily augment information there in an authenticated way. INSPIRE automatically receives these updates within just a day or two. This can be done at any time, and adding the publication information on arXiv does not result in a new version either in arXiv or in INSPIRE.

Once you’ve logged in at arXiv, click the Journal ref symbol beside the papers you’d like to update.

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This will take you to a page where you can enter the relevant information.

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More information on how to do this can be found at the arXiv help page on the topic.

Doing this on arXiv has several advantages. Information updated on arXiv will flow to other services as well, whereas information added to INSPIRE currently doesn’t propagate yet. While arXiv can process such requests automatically due to the login, it requires manual intervention at INSPIRE and hence it may take more time for the updates to appear. If you have any comments or questions on this topic, drop us a line at feedback@inspirehep.net.

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.

INSPIRE @OR2014

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Those of you following us on Twitter have already seen that the INSPIRE team contributed to this year’s Open Repository conference in Helsinki.

We were there to share our experience and features with other state of the art services. Also, we took advantage of the event to discover other services that could provide further content to INSPIRE, so we can provide you with a complete picture of your research.

2014-06-12

This year, a big part of the presentations focused on data. DOIs for citable data are already a reality in many disciplines. But, as it turned out, it looks like INSPIRE is one of the very few around that can actually track citations to data. Have a look at one example of data reuse and citation tracking in INSPIRE.

ORCID iDs were another important topic during the conference. Many systems, from data repositories to publishers, are integrating them as author identifiers. They enable you to connect your research globally, import and export your publication list, independently of the backend used by each platform.

On INSPIRE, you can link your ORCID with your author profile. This will help us to discover your publications in other fields (e.g. condensed matter or mathematics) and enrich your profile. During the conference, we also presented a preview of our new author pages. They will be deployed next week, stay tuned!
Finally, during the dedicated Invenio session (the software INSPIRE is built on), we presented a first sneak peek of the INSPIRE Labs website. With a brand new modern design, we will use it to test many of the new features coming to INSPIRE. Let us know at usability-testing@inspirehep.net if you want to become an INSPIRE tester and start experimenting with them very soon!

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.

IHEP joins INSPIRE

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The INSPIRE team is excited to announce that the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHEP) has joined the INSPIRE collaboration. IHEP is the fifth laboratory to contribute to this global effort at the service of the worldwide High-Energy Physics community, alongside CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC.

This new partnership is an exciting step in the way our services have evolved over the last four decades. The INSPIRE predecessor, SPIRES, started in the ‘70s as a High-Energy Physics publication database, jointly operated by SLAC and DESY. From a dissemination of printed lists of pre-prints and articles, SPIRES then was searchable by email and became the first website in North America and first database accessible through the World Wide Web in 1991. Having started supporting the effort in the ‘90s, Fermilab fully joined the team in the early 2000s. As of 2007, with the arrival of CERN, the INSPIRE collaboration was born. A fully new infrastructure and augmented services were launched in 2010, replacing SPIRES with the modern INSPIRE. As High-Energy Physics is becoming truly global, with stronger and stronger collaborations across the three regions, IHEP becomes the first Asian member to join the INSPIRE collaboration.

As the most prestigious research center of particle physics, advanced accelerator physics and technologies, and radiation technologies and application in China, IHEP both supports established scientists and nourishes young talents ever since its establishment. With decades of development, IHEP is now one of the leading scientific research centers in the world. The information services department of IHEP plays a crucial role in collecting, curating and providing scientific information for researchers in China. A leader in global collaboration in China, in 1994 IHEP became the first institution in the country to have a fully operational world-wide Internet connection. IHEP led the way for other Chinese scientific institutes in using advanced information technology and making scholarly works publicly available to the global community. These achievements resonate with the mission of INSPIRE: to create a community based information system that supports scholarly communication.

Under strong support from IHEP and the other four laboratories, on May 8th Runsheng Yu of the IHEP information services department visited Fermilab to speak at the INSPIRE Advisory Board meeting. He outlined IHEP’s plans to contribute to INSPIRE, and we expect to see great improvements in the disambiguation of Chinese physicists’ names both at their home institute and worldwide. IHEP is working hard to enhance Chinese HEPNames records, which will make it much easier to differentiate Chinese authors from one another and give them the recognition they deserve. This work must be done by hand in order to ensure the accuracy of the information in the database.

We look forward to a long and harmonious collaboration with IHEP, and are excited to be reaching further out to the HEP community worldwide with our first partner in Asia.

Collaborative post by Xiaoli Chen and Melissa Clegg

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!

 

Survey results are in!

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A few weeks back, we asked for your feedback on INSPIRE with a short survey. In a week, almost 600 of you helped us out: a great thank you! We learned a lot from you, and we would like to share a short summary of your replies and your suggestions.

You appreciate the speed of INSPIRE, which you find convenient to use and up-to-date. You are pleased that INSPIRE contains all papers relevant to HEP, and you find INSPIRE accurate in terms of author information and stats. You highlighted flexible search options and the variety of export formats, as well as links to arXiv and other sources.

The survey confirmed what we read in your messages: papers’ references and citation counts are most important. We have made a form available for you to correct references and citations, and we are working on making the process easier.

We are also improving how you can ‘claim papers’ and the recognition of special characters in order to refine the author disambiguation.

We are also aware that searching for exact journal articles is sometimes frustrating because of the way INSPIRE treats abbreviations and spaces. We will be working hard on these aspects of searching, as well as on other search suggestions you made. We will keep you posted on this blog and on our Twitter feed.

Our team has made significant progress in enhancing some features that you have mentioned, including ‘self cites’ and extended coverage of HEP-related papers from other fields.

The survey has helped us understand what is important for our users, and we always look forward to receiving your feedback. Feel free to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net.

INSPIRE takes another step forward

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Last spring, when the SPIRES user interface was superseded by INSPIRE, we noted that SPIRES was still being used for some important backend data maintenance functions. As described in our posting about the life of an arXiv paper, this slowed our workflow as we had to update records in a semi-decommissioned SPIRES system before changes could propagate to INSPIRE. Some weeks ago, we took another step forward and INSPIRE has now taken over all backend functions from SPIRES. With INSPIRE as the only platform, we can work much faster to update records. In addition, working solely with INSPIRE will allow us to offer you better forms for corrections or additions to the database. Based on your feedback, we will develop even more useful tools to improve INSPIRE further. So if you have any comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to write to us at feedback@inspirehep.net.