New author pages include HEPNames info

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Our new, fast-loading author publication profile pages, e.g. http://inspirehep.net/author/R.P.Feynman.1/ provide a comprehensive overview of a person’s publications including citation summary and co-authors. This information is now available to full extent as the boxes showing keywords etc. can be expanded by clicking. For your own page, it will allow you to claim your papers and make sure your list of publications is complete and accurate. Furthermore, the new pages combine INSPIRE’s publication information with the HEPNames biographical entry for the person. In some cases where we aren’t sure of the exact matching between the author page and a HEPNames entry, we offer a list of possibilities with the option to identify one of them as the right one or add a new one. More information to the HEPNames entry can be added by clicking on the blue update button and your help here will be greatly appreciated!

To see these pages, just click on an author’s name the next time you do an INSPIRE search. And of course you can let us know how you like the new profile pages by sending mail to authors@inspirehep.net.

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.

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.

SPIRES and INSPIRE – a brief insight into backend operations

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INSPIRE took over SPIRES frontend services already, SPIRES backend, however, is still running and in partial use in order to get content into INSPIRE as not all of INSPIRE’s backend tools have reached production level yet. While all auxiliary databases except HepNames are already maintained exclusively on INSPIRE, a lot of information for HEP is still generated on SPIRES’ side and updates are sent to INSPIRE several times a day. Bibtex keys are an example and it takes them several hours after the arXiv harvesting to show up on INSPIRE. Citation curation, however, is done on INSPIRE. Furthermore, the theses collection is maintained already completely on INSPIRE and long author lists using author.xml files such as those of the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS are only handled on INSPIRE. Juggling two very different systems does introduce more delays than we would like, but no information is lost and it just might sometimes take a bit longer to appear in this transition phase. If we encounter this, we try to catch up on the information but we might miss some records. So whenever you as a user come across a record which you think is missing important information, we highly appreciate it if you let us know at feedback@inspirehep.net. We’ll not only be able to fix the record, but you’ll be helping us diagnosing glitches in this temporary procedure. We expect to be gradually able to move more and more backend processes to INSPIRE in the next few months, so those inconveniences will disappear.

Good bye, SPIRES!

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It started in the late 1960’s as a database of particle physics literature, it went online as the first website in North America in 1991, on Thursday 26th April 2012, SPIRES frontend will be shut off. After decades of being the first address for literature search and connected services, SPIRES will go offline and the baton of providing tools for researchers in HEP will be entirely passed on to INSPIRE.

INSPIRE provides even more innovations based on the experience of SPIRES in managing the discipline’s information resources and in connecting and communicating successfully with the community. Besides the fact that it is faster than SPIRES, INSPIRE provides searchable fulltexts, complete reference lists for recent papers, much more detailed references and even plots extracted from arXiv articles. In addition, it offers author disambiguation for high-quality author profiles and better search capabilities. Furthermore, users can even improve the database by verifying their publications and correcting references.

The SPIRES backend, though, is still used for record creation and curation as the full workflow is not yet implemented on INSPIRE.

If you should encounter any trouble using INSPIRE or have any questions about our tools and features, don’t hesitate to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net.

Citation curation moved to INSPIRE

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As a further step towards the SPIRES shut off, citation curation is now done completely on INSPIRE. The INSPIRE reference extractor is more powerful than the SPIRES algorithm and hence, there will be more correct references extracted automatically already from day one. Furthermore, this means that we are able to show new citations faster now.

During the last weeks, SPIRES overwrote references extracted on INSPIRE which has led – as some of you noticed – to citation fluctuations. But all correct citations will be back again. Moreover, we will continue to manually add references that our extractor did not catch. And by the way – as a user of INSPIRE, you can help us by adding and correcting references yourself via the reference update form (https://old.inspirehep.net/help/reference_corrections).

Please send questions and feedback on references or other INSPIRE services and tools to feedback@inspirehep.net.

Did your citation numbers change during the last week?

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As some of you noticed, last week INSPIRE citation counts were momentarily unstable. This was due to the fact that, as part of the migration of data between SPIRES and INSPIRE, we cleaned up our citation database and deleted some “ghost citations”. This means either of two things had meanwhile happened: in a small number of cases the citing records were removed from INSPIRE or, most often, the citation list from arXiv pre-prints was updated to reflect either the published version of the article or the final re-submission of the pre-print. This is a common process which, with the migration between SPIRES and INSPIRE, had recently taken some backlog. Therefore, numbers might be slightly smaller now but no correct citation will be lost. In addition, better author disambiguation and authors claiming their papers help us calculate citation counts more accurately on INSPIRE.

Following the requests for more citation metrics we received we will soon provide more features for the citesummary.

For any questions and feedback on citations and other INSPIRE services, please contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net

HEPJobs comes to INSPIRE

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HEPJobs is the latest database to transfer over to INSPIRE: http://inspirehep.net/Jobs

HEPJobs is a well established, free-of-charge service, where people can post and find academic and research jobs of interest to the community in high energy physics, nuclear physics, accelerator physics and astrophysics. It allows thousands of people in HEP to connect as both employers and job seekers providing a natural and efficient match between job ads and viewers. Over the past decade we have listed over 8,000 jobs; in 2010 alone we added over 1,600 jobs. In peak season, our site gets over 5,000 hits per day.

We accept direct submissions of ads and also collect job listings from our partner site, AcademicJobsOnline.org, and the websites of universities and laboratories around the world.

Over the coming months we’ll be adding improvements such as the ability to post vacancies, modify or delete them or extend the deadline immediately through a web form without having to wait for a human operator.

Please send any questions regarding HEPJobs to jobs@inspirehep.net.

Heath O’Connell
Fermilab.

Looking for articles with a specific number of authors?

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We released a new search feature helping you to narrow down your search results. Author count (keyword: ac) allows you to refine a search to show papers with a specific number of authors or a range of authors. For example “ac 5+” will only show papers with at least five authors. “ac 1” as search syntax shows you for instance papers only by a single author without any co-authors.

Just experiment with the new searching possibilities, combine it with other search field specifiers, and tell us about your experiences at feedback@inspirehep.net

Try for example:
find a ellis and ac 1
find a ellis and ac 5+
find a ellis and ac 3->10
find exp cms and ac 1000+

Syntactically speaking

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Telling a computer what to search for is a complicated business. Many of you are used to the SPIRES syntax with all its power and quirks. We’ve worked hard to retain the search syntax you are familiar with as well as allowing for a new Google-style search syntax.

What you might not realize about SPIRES syntax is that is actually the database query language. When you search SPIRES, you are searching the raw data. The language is actually incredibly powerful and only a few people even know all the possibilities it has. But because of that power, there are many ways to search and different people become fond of different ways.

Moreover, a search system must interpret the values you type in your search queries. It would not be reasonable to expect you to type query strings with raw data exactly as it occurs in the database. When you search SPIRES, the search system `massages’ the values you enter, trying to recognize various date formats, or incomplete article numbers, or trying to tell author first names from family names. INSPIRE uses different search technology than SPIRES also in this respect. To reproduce SPIRES search experience in INSPIRE therefore means not only to support SPIRES search syntax per se, but also to perform the SPIRES style of query value massaging, again with all its power and its quirks.

Most individuals, we find, use a small subset of functions of the SPIRES database query language, but different people tend to use different subsets.

That means we had to built in a translator for SPIRES query language into INSPIRE. Unfortunately, that is a daunting task with limited returns at some point. We know that some you use some fairly obscure feature of SPIRES that is rarely used overall and that would be extremely demanding to port to INSPIRE so we might not be able to provide every single search syntax that you use. However, we have scoured our search logs to ensure that a very high fraction of you will be able to use identical syntax as you transition from SPIRES to INSPIRE.

We urge you to try out the new INSPIRE syntax as well as you’ll find it is just as powerful and has extra features because of how the underlying Invenio engine uses the ideas of papers being described by logical fields and their values, as opposed to SPIRES method for handling search.

Take a look at the information about the new kind of search here, or just experiment with it yourself. Please let us know your search experiences, either with the SPIRES or the INSPIRE search methods. Hearing about your search experience will enable us to improve it!