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!

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+”.

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Last spring, when the SPIRES user interface was superseded by INSPIRE, we noted that SPIRES was still being used for some important backend data maintenance functions.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.

New conference submission forms

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Are you organising a HEP conference or going to attend one and want it to appear on INSPIRE? We now offer a new form to submit conference information to our database. To create an entry, you have to provide your email address and some basic information about the conference such as title, date, country, and city. But of course you can provide even more like URLs to the conference homepage, contact information, a description of the conference or information about the proceedings published afterwards.

Information about conferences announced on the CERN INDICO system will appear automatically. If you want to stay updated about new conferences in the field of HEP, just subscribe to our RSSfeed.

We are looking forward to your submissions. In case you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to write to feedback@inspirehep.net.

Topcites 2011 Edition

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We are pleased to present the first edition of the annual list of “topcited” papers in INSPIRE. It is more than a single list. We provide, for each year,  both a list of the topcited papers of the year and an all-time topcited list showing the classic papers of our field.

In order to provide meaningful coverage of each subfield of interest to the INSPIRE community, each arXiv category has its own  section. To take hep-ph as an example, one list shows the hep-ph papers which received the most citations  that year,  with citations coming from all papers in the database (e.g., eprints, journal articles, conference proceedings, theses) and the other shows the papers most often cited by hep-ph papers that year; this approach allows one to see  the subfield’s impact on the entire HEP field as well as the trending topics within that subfield.  We do this for all hep* archives as well as the astro-ph, gr-qc,  math (encompassing math-ph and math.*) and nucl* archives. It is important to note, however, that in tracking citations, we focus on our “core” collection, defined as all eprints from the hep*, gr-qc, nucl*, astro-ph.(CO and HE) and physics.acc-ph archives and papers in these subfields from other sources; citations for papers in other subfields are less likely to be comprehensive. Usual caveats regarding references and citations apply.

http://inspirehep.net/info/hep/stats/topcites/index

The life of an arXiv paper on INSPIRE

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Dear INSPIRE blog readers,

I am a HEP arXiv paper and I was recently invited to tell you about my life on INSPIRE. This should help you understand the work the INSPIRE team does and explain why, for example. it may take some time for references to show up. So – here’s what happens to me:

After I first appear on arXiv, it takes INSPIRE about 2 hours to harvest my friends and me. This usually happens at 4 a.m. CET. INSPIRE extracts my plots and indexes my metadata and fulltext which takes about 1-2 hours. When all this is done, I am visible for you users on INSPIRE. In the next step, something called “reference extractor” is run on my PDF and the references it extracts are linked via arXiv number, journal reference, report number or DOI to corresponding existing INSPIRE records where they are counted as citations.

The main curation for my data – excluding references – is still done on SPIRES, and this will probably continue for the next 2 months. So later in the day, my INSPIRE record will be overwritten by the SPIRES record which will add the BibTeX key to my metadata.

Based solely on author names, I will be assigned to likely author profiles. The next day, I will be assigned standardized keywords which will be improved by physicists in the following weeks.

Since there’s a high chance I might be revised within my first week on arXiv, there will be no human curation on my record on INSPIRE during this time. Any revised version during this period will completely overwrite my record and my references will be re-extracted. After this embargo period, my metadata will be thoroughly curated: title, author names and references are corrected. Affiliations, report numbers, collaboration and experiment names are added. If I am a conference paper, the record will be linked to the corresponding entry in the conference database. Missing or wrong references can be added or corrected by you as INSPIRE users via a web interface. Using the additional information on affiliations, co-authors and collaboration names the algorithmic matching of my author profiles will be refined. If I should be assigned to a wrong author, my authors can claim me as their own through a web interface.

After a few months as an arXiv paper on INSPIRE, I will most likely be published in a journal or conference proceedings. I will then be included in the feeds publishers give to INSPIRE, which are matched against INSPIRE records based on title and author names. Here it is important to have human intervention as my title, or even my authors, might be modified. Matching records are merged and publication note and DOI or a link to the publisher web page are added to my INSPIRE record. Citations I gain are from now on based on both my arXiv ID and publication note.

For my relatives – papers from other sources like non-hep* arXiv categories, journals, conference proceedings, thesis servers – life on INSPIRE is a little bit more complicated. First the ones relevant for HEP have to be selected; this is done semi-automatically with the aid of a script identifying core keywords in the fulltext. Then subject categories have to be assigned to them. If they are of immediate relevance to High Energy Physics, they are considered as so called “core” papers for the database and go through the same hand curation as me.

The INSPIRE team is constantly working on improving this workflow and adding new tools to make the process faster. And they are very happy to respond to the questions and comments you send to feedback@inspirehep.net.

I hope you liked this short insight into my life.

Enjoy working with INSPIRE!
Your HEP arXiv paper

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.

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!

Author profile pages updated

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Once more, we extended the information we provide on our author profile pages on INSPIRE. You can now find subject categories among other information such as affiliations and co-authors. Furthermore, we provide you with a graph showing the numbers of publications per year. You might need to clear your browser cache to see the graph. As it takes a lot of processing to calculate this information, we precompute them regularly for your convenience. In the bottom right corner of the page, you can find the date the page has been generated and a link to recompute it to get the most current information on an author.

To access these author profile pages and see our novelties, just click on an author name the next time you do a search on INSPIRE. If you think there’s still information missing on these pages or have other comments and questions on author pages, don’t hesitate to contact us at feedback@inspirehep.net.