Search tips: Dates and full-text search

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Dear INSPIRE users,

Following the previous blogpost with author search tips, we would like to share a couple of more tricks for easier search on INSPIRE.

Dates

  • You can search by dates using two-digit or four-digit years by: find a maldacena and d 97
  • You can search by a period of time by: find a maldacena and d 1997->2011
  • You can both search for the date when a record was added (da) and the date when a record was updated (du). Just remember that searching for dates before or after a certain year will also include results for the specified date, along with all other results.
  • Specifying date searches with “today” or “last year” also gives results. Check here for more information.
  • The search above in Invenio syntax will look like this: author:maldacena year:1997

Full-text

Just have in mind that full-text searching is available for all arXiv papers, but not for all theses, reports and journal articles.

For more search tips, check here.

Feel free to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net if you still have any questions.

Search tips: Authors

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Dear INSPIRE users,

Thanks to your numerous responses to our survey earlier in the spring, we have understood the most common challenges you have with the search syntax of INSPIRE. Thus, we have compiled the following suggestions for your searches – please try and let us know what you think.

  • If you wish to limit your search to papers only with/by a single author, you can do it by using the author count feature. For example, to find all articles with “a j ellis” as the sole author: find a j ellis and ac 1
  • Author count search also works when you want to limit the search to a range of number of authors, for example, from one to ten authors: find a j ellis and ac 1->10
  • You can also search for collaborations with more than a certain number of authors: find cn cdf and ac 100+
  • You also had some questions on author searching as well. We would like to point out that the sophisticated SPIRES-style author searching also works in INSPIRE. For example, “j ellis” or “ellis, j” will give the same result. But the more precise you make your search, the more precise your results are. If you include a middle initial, results will be restricted to match only with records that also have the middle initial. Including the full given name will restrict the search to match only on the initial or the exact given name.
  • Another way to search for an author is using the Invenio syntax: author:”j ellis” (for further guidance on author search, check here).
  • To search for the exact name of an author as it appears in INSPIRE, use the following construction: find ea [familly name], [first name or initial]. For example: find ea ellis, j

For more search tips, check here.

Feel free to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net if you still have any questions.

Want to see highly cited papers at a glance?

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INSPIRE now highlights top cited papers in result lists. Papers that are cited more than 50 times are considered as top cited. They currently make up about 8% of the INSPIRE database. 0,06% of the citeable papers in INSPIRE are even cited more than 1000 times; if you’re interested in more statistics, check out our citation summary for the whole INSPIRE database. The top cited papers are now marked with a little flag next to the “cited by” link in the result list. Depending on how often the paper is cited, the flag will be green (50+), blue (100+) orange (250+), red (500+) or purple (1000+).

Just search “find topcite 50+” and you will see all the topcited papers on INSPIRE. You may also combine a top cite search with any other usual search parameter. e.g. “find t top quark and topcite 500+”.

Confronting those confounding conference notes

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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!

Looking for citations without self-cites?

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Following many requests for more citation metrics, we have now introduced a second page of the Citesummary on INSPIRE where you can find additional columns excluding self-cites and citations to the Review of Particle Physics. You can access this extended Citesummary page via a link at the bottom of the first Citesummary page. Furthermore, we have provided some more detailed explanations of the various citation metrics; you can find them here or via a link on the Citesummary page.

Try the new metrics and tell us how you like them or if you would like some additional metrics at feedback@inspirehep.net.  

Expanding the citation universe

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We are working on expanding our horizons in regard to citation counts. In addition to the SPIRES tradition of tracking citations to arXiv eprints and published journal articles, we are now starting to track citations to report numbers and conference proceedings, for example http://inspirehep.net/record/183109. 
This is a complex task and will take a bit longer. We will be able to offer a better service of citation analysis and interlinking to and from additional material, such as unpublished papers which did not appear on arXiv, theses and experimental notes.

As this work is ongoing you might be interested in the current citation stats of INSPIRE. We can currently track over 700,000 citeable papers out of 960,000 records overall. Of these 0.06% have over 1,000 citations, 0.24% have over 500 citations and 3.3% have over 100 citations.

Interested in more stats? Check here! Interested in searching for highly cited papers? Just use topcite, e.g. find topcite 5000+ or combine it with another search parameter, e.g. find t top quark and topcite 1000+ 

By the way – our algorithms are not perfect, yet, and can miss citations especially when figures or tables appear in the middle of reference lists, so you can help us by correcting references and citations yourself on INSPIRE. For details, please see: http://inspirehep.net/info/faq/references_citations Please note that we’re a bit slow at the moment as we’re still completing the back office transition to INSPIRE, so it may take a few weeks for us to process your corrections but rest assured we will get to them.

A new way of citation searching

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Citations are of interest to the HEP community as a way of finding new papers on a topic of interest. It is therefore natural to want to find the latest citations of your own papers in order to learn of the latest developments in your field. In SPIRES this was almost impossible to do, as you had to look for new citations of each of your papers. INSPIRE is more sophisticated and allows you to do second-order searches that let you find papers citing a particular set of papers, for example those written by an author of interest: find refersto author e.witten.1 or in Invenio form refersto:author:e.witten.1

Every INSPIRE search has a link at the bottom that enables you to track the result in an RSS feed. You can then get daily RSS updates through, e.g. Google Reader or the built-in RSS readers of Internet Explorer and Firefox.  Doing this, you’ll be able to easily keep track of new citations to an author as they appear. As an aside, note that we have used the INSPIRE author identity, E.Witten.1, rather than just a name to make sure the search is unique.

This will work for searches beyond “author”. For example you could find the papers citing work done by your institution: find refersto aff “princeton u.” and then narrow that down to only citations of your institution by another institution: find refersto aff “princeton u.” and af oxford u. You basically have the full power of INSPIRE searching at your disposal.

Equal sign removed from search syntax

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Ever wanted to search for N=2 SUSY but experienced troubles with the special meaning of the equal sign? You can now type N=2 in the search box and find all papers with N=2in the title or abstract. In SPIRES syntax you’d have to use quotation marks, e.g. find t “N=2”. Omitting the quotation marks in a SPIRES-style search would remove the equal sign as well, giving you papers with N2 in the title. 
In addition, linking to the new pdglive via PDG identifiers like S032:DESIG=1 has been implemented. To make this possible the old spires search variant “field=value”, e.g.”author=dumbledore”, had to be disabled. Since our log files show that this syntax is only used very rarely nowadays this is a small price to pay for these new search options. But if you were using searches like find a witten and date=2012 try find a witten and date 2012 instead.

Finding published articles, theory papers or conference proceedings

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Sometimes you only want, for example, published articles or theory papers. INSPIRE has two search terms to help with this:

1. type code, tc, lets you specify the type of paper:
b  Book,
c  Conference paper,
l   Lectures,
p  Published,
r   Review,
t   Thesis,
e.g. find t quark and tc p and tc r or find cn atlas not tc c

2. field code, fc, lets you specify what field you are interested in (based on arXiv categories but extended to non-eprints):
a   Astrophysics
b   Accelerators
c   Computing
e   Experiment-HEP
g   Gravitation and Cosmology
i    Instrumentation
l    Lattice
m  Math and Math Physics
n   Theory-Nucl
o   Other
p   Phenomenology-HEP
q   General Physics
t    Theory-HEP
x   Experiment-Nucl
e.g. find aff fermilab and fc b or find topcite 500+ and fc e

More search tips are available at: http://inspirehep.net/help/search-tips

Working with collaborations

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When it comes to INSPIRE searching, large collaborations have two notable features: they write a lot of papers and they have a lot of authors. This can lead to two difficulties when searching:

  • Because collaborations have a lot of authors, many searches for theorists and other authors not on a collaboration will also return papers by collaborations where someone has a similar name.
  • If you are looking for papers by the full collaboration, individual members of the collaboration write a lot of conference papers and these will also show when you try to find the official results of the full collaboration.

INSPIRE can help with both of these issues using a new feature, the author-count (ac) index, introduced recently on our blog. To address challenge 1 you can limit the search to papers with less than, say, 10 authors, e.g.: find a j smith and ac 1->10

To address challenge 2 you want to restrict the result to papers with, say, greater than 100 authors, e.g.: find exp cern-lhc-atlas and ac 100+

As always, INSPIRE allows you to use author-count in all kinds of searches to get just the result you want.

P.S. You can also figure out the citation summary for the papers that, for example, Richard Feynman wrote alone with find a feynman and ac 1.