In order to fulfill user requests more efficiently and better comply with data privacy requirements, we have migrated to a new support tool.

The primary method to contact us now goes through a form allowing us to collect more structured feedback, and it remains possible to perform many common operations yourselves. Head to our “contact us” help page (also linked from the footer of the main website) for more information.

In the past, we were primarily processing support requests by email at feedback@inspirehep.net, help@inspirehep.net, authors@inspirehep.net, etc. These email addresses are no longer active and new messages sent there will not receive a reply.

In INSPIRE, reference lists are automatically extracted from papers and processed in order to track citations. While this process is fairly reliable, sometimes references are not recognized properly and the corresponding citation is not captured.

Previously, if you noticed incorrect references, you had to open a support ticket to inform the INSPIRE support staff that changes needed to be made, which was a somewhat tedious process for both parties. While this option remains available for more complex cases, if only a few references are recognized incorrectly, you can now fix the issue yourself by logging in with your ORCID account and clicking on the “edit” button next in the reference list.

You can refer to our documentation for more details. Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

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>.

Personal names are neither unique nor permanent. You can write or transcribe them in different ways. You can get married and change your family name. You can even find colleagues in HEP with the same name, e.g. John Smith. What happens when the John Smith you are looking for writes a paper? How do you tell him apart from his namesakes and find his articles? And does that article written by J.C.Smith in 1993 on [Nuclear Physics Revolution], belong to your colleague John, or Jim C. from Stanford?  This is something INSPIRE has been working on for a long time. We introduced INSPIRE IDs to uniquely establish your identity in our HEPNames database and more recently Author Publication Profiles, such as J.Q.Physicist.1 to collect all your papers together. But this is only for HEP, what about the wider world? Publishers introduced their own identification systems, so you probably have noticed that you have ended up with many IDs that describe your academic publications and CVs. These disparate identifier systems suffer from only partial coverage of a researcher’s corpus and interoperability issues.ORCID to the rescue!

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-profit organization supported by a global community of organizational members, including research organizations, publishers, funders, professional associations, and other stakeholders in the research ecosystem which  has developed a unique researcher identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers. ORCID ID can hold a record of all your research activities, variants of your name, affiliations, etc. You can also use it for manuscript submissions to most of the major publishers.

It helps you centralize your information and sign your work unambiguously, no matter how your personal details, affiliations or field of work change. It is also an invaluable tool to track impact and grant credit to authors. It is a single identifier that follows you throughout your career. Having an ORCID ID gives your professional circle the ability to see your publications and your work experience. To sum up, ORCID can provide you a detailed professional record, something that can be a very useful tool for researchers that want to keep their publications and research in the spotlight. Moreover, some of the biggest research libraries as INSPIRE are collaborating with ORCID, to offer one unique and widely accepted ID.

How does ORCID work?

To begin with, an ORCID ID is a unique 16-digit code (e.g.0000-0002-5769-7094), given to you upon the registration of your ORCID account. After registering you can manage all your information from your profile page. You can add as many details as you want and set the level of privacy you desire for the information you enter (public, limited, or private).

image00
Fig 1: ORCID profile page

What makes ORCID special is its ability to synchronize content with other platforms and services. That means that you spend less time (re)entering data and have more time available to conduct research. At this time, well-known services collaborating with ORCID are Scopus, Nature, APS, Faculty of 1000. In case you are wondering what your publication page would look like in ORCID let’s have a look at a typical example in Fig. 2. You can also see that this person has connected  his ORCID with ResearcherID and Scopus:

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Fig 2: ORCID publication page

If you are interested in creating your own ORCID, just click here.

INSPIRE has been working on some exciting new features! Publications are leading to their respective authors  but with help from ORCID, INSPIRE is going to be sure about the author’s identity and the procedure to claim your own publications will become easier.

Keep an eye on the INSPIRE-HEP blog and twitter for our next blog post, to better understand ORCID’s significance and use for INSPIRE and INSPIRE Labs!

 

 

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.

Suggest_forms

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.

manual_form
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!

What is INSPIRE Labs and why are we creating this platform?

INSPIRE Labs will be a new place where you can test new features and interact with our team of programmers and designers through various methods of feedback so that the finished result will be as close as possible to your needs and expectations. INSPIRE Labs is not a replacement for INSPIRE, but is used as an incubator for features and suggestions that might help the community to evolve its current tools and workflow. With a modern look and responsive design, INSPIRE Labs is going to facilitate your everyday academic, HEP related activities.

labs
Figure 1: INSPIRE Labs logo

What we are currently working on  

INSPIRE Labs uses new technologies to build advanced features and intuitive interfaces in order to provide you with a better and faster service. The first feature that will be introduced is the suggestion form that will help you suggest publications easily and effectively, suggestions that could be included to INSPIRE. You will find more information and tips in our next blog post! Another part of this effort is a fresh redesign and revisit of INSPIRE’s services as individual blocks of a single information architecture. Our core collections will stay the same, with one significant addition though the data collection, which will provide you a centralised search point to find data sets, software and other supporting material.

And there are plenty more things to come…

In the near future, you will see more and more features appear in Labs! You can expect visually and functionally upgraded versions of some of the already known features of INSPIRE as part of this effort. We will make changes to evolve the interface and functionality of one of the most basic aspects of INSPIRE, the search tool! Our main goal is to improve the look and the functionality, so that you can search better and faster in the future.

However, your feedback is vital in this process. We have developed an easy to find feedback button at the right side of INSPIRE Labs. Feedback is easier than ever!

Do not hesitate to share with us all of your ideas and concerns. Let’s try to bring INSPIRE closer to your needs. Stay up to date for sneak peaks on new features and other news on our blog and twitter and don’t forget to check our blog next week to find out more about our new suggestion form!

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.

After months of hard work on improving our author profile pages, we are happy to present the new design and features and to answer the most important questions you might have about the new pages.

How do I get to the author pages?

Author profiles are interlaced with all the content in INSPIRE, thus you can find them in different ways:

  • Using the HepNames collection and click the author profile link. However, if after clicking Author Profile you land on the Person Search page instead, you will be presented with a choice of authors.  Pick the best match and click “Publication List”.
  • Using the HEP collection, click on any author’s name.
  • If you are already browsing an author profile page, you can find others by using the search bar in the top right corner.

What’s new?

As a regular user, the first thing you will notice is that the information appears now re-organized. It is displayed in three main columns: personal information, publications and output, and stats. We think this reflects the feedback we got from you in our usability testing sessions in the best possible way. The layout will adjust to your screen size automatically so you might not always see the three column structure.

In the publications box, you will find more material integrated: data sets and other publications, even outside INSPIRE’s scope! In this way your profile is more complete and reflects your research activities better.

We also changed the layout of the “Personal details” box. Your field, experiments, and institutions are now arranged in an easy-to-read and easy-to-update style.

So… have a look!

new author page

Where does the information on my profile page come from?

The profile is built by an algorithm that extracts information from the papers assigned to the profile. However, all personal information is curated by our staff. We want to keep it accurate! You can always help us by providing more information about yourself or your publications.

What if my personal information box is empty?

If your author profile is not yet linked to a record in our person database, the personal information box will look like this.

001

You can either select the best match or, if none of the suggested records fit or you don’t get a suggestion at all, you can create a new record.

If, by mistake, your author profile is connected to the wrong person record, send an email to authors@inspirehep.net and our staff will fix it manually for you.

How can I edit my profile?

The “Manage profile” page allows you to merge profiles, connect to ORCID, manage your personal information, and contact us for help if you should get stuck and our help pages don’t get you any further.

Click “Manage Profile” below your name on the author page. After logging in with your arXiv account you can get it linked with your author profile in INSPIRE (you just have to do it once, of course). If you don’t have an arXiv account, you can also proceed as a guest. In that case, an INSPIRE staff member will have to approve your input, which may take longer to appear.

But what about…?

For every question not yet answered, feel free to ask it as a comment here or share it with us at feedback@inspirehep.net. We’re always interested in suggestions on how to improve INSPIRE. If you are interested in being a tester to give us feedback in usability sessions, we would welcome your participation.

Did you know that INSPIRE has a tool that generates a complete and properly ordered bibliography from the references you cite in your LaTeX file? With this tool you can also easily convert a LaTeX reference list to BibTeX format. Just be sure to use one of these forms for each of your citations:

  1. INSPIRE Texkeys, e.g. cite{Beacom:2010kk}
  2. Eprint numbers, e.g. cite{1004.3311} or cite{hep-th/9711200}
  3. Journal references, e.g. cite{Phys.Rev.D66.10001}

Then you can upload your LaTeX file here and you will receive the list of the references in the order they are cited in your paper. The system will understand cite fields with multiple papers such as cite{Beacom:2010kk, hep-th/9711200}. But note that if you combine multiple papers under a single texkey, only the one belonging to the texkey will show up.  When you upload the file, you can choose either LaTeX or BibTeX as the output. Remember to reorder your references if you edit the file, or simply resubmit to us.

If you would like to convert your LaTeX bibliography to  BibTeX, simply change “%cite” to “cite” in the file and upload it to the same form with BibTeX as the output.

More detailed instructions can be found here. We hope this takes some of the hassle out of creating reference lists. If you encounter difficulties or have more suggestions, let us know via feedback@inspirehep.net.


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.