Incorrect references are now easier to fix

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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.

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!

 

INSPIRE service upgrade

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We prepared for a major infrastructure update and roll-out of software improvements. We try to make the switch as seamless as possible. Thus, tomorrow Wednesday 23rd October, from 9 am – 5 pm CEST, INSPIRE will be upgraded. Searching will not be affected. However, other services will not be available during the update. These include job postings, conference submissions and all activities related to the author profile pages.

After this INSPIRE will be back to full and even better service including e.g. new author pages (watch for an upcoming blog post).

Our apologies for the inconvenience this may cause!

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.

A Million!

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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!

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.

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.

BibTeX key generation now on INSPIRE

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BibTeX key generation was improved and consolidated and every paper on INSPIRE is now guaranteed to have a BibTeX key. BibTeX keys allow cross referencing of bibliographic information in LaTeX documents. The keys are part of the BibTeX output format and are generated as follows: <family name of first author>:<year>< 3 random letters>

For collaboration papers without a list of authors upon ingestion to INSPIRE, the TeX key will be generated based on the collaboration name. Records with existing SPIRES keys are not affected by this and those keys will remain functional.

For comments on and suggestions for our services, don’t hesitate to write us at feedback@inspirehep.net.

New RSS feeds

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A few weeks ago, we pointed out that our RSS feed is a great tool for keeping you up to date, e.g. with the latest citations to your papers.

We’ve now improved our RSS feed so that more information about papers is shown in your RSS reader. From now on, in addition to title, first author and abstract, we’ll include arXiv and report numbers as well as publication information. RSS feeds are also available for the other collections on INSPIRE. So you can subscribe to the Jobs RSS feed and get new job posts conveniently in your RSS reader or stay updated about conferences via the Conference RSS feed. You can customise these feeds by searching and subscribing to the RSS feed at the bottom of the search result page.

Let us know how you like our new RSS feed and tell us if you’re still missing information at feedback@inspirehep.net.

INSPIRE maintenance

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We are making improvements to the INSPIRE infrastructure this weekend. This will require a short service outage early on Sunday, May 20 2012, around 1am CEST. INSPIRE should be available again within one hour.

The anticipated downtime for different timezones:

  • USA West Coast: 4pm-5pm Saturday evening
  • USA East Coast: 7pm-8pm Saturday evening
  • London (UK): 12am-1am Sunday morning
  • Western Europe: 1am-2am Sunday morning
  • Beijing (CN): 7am-8am Sunday morning
  • Japan: 8am-9am Sunday morning

The scheduled upgrades are aimed at improving responsiveness and resilience of INSPIRE and will provide added capacity for additional services to the community in the future.

Thank you for using INSPIRE and apologies for the inconvenience.