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.

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will be able to offer a better service of citation analysis and interlinking to and from additional material, such as unpublished papers which did not appear on arXiv, theses and experimental notes.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

Citation fluctuations

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While implementing some improvements to our citation algorithm we introduced a bug which led to overcounting citations for about 2% of our records. We are in the process of fixing this now and are reindexing the citation data. This has caused some citation counts to drop initially. Numbers are going slowly up again and citation counts should be correct before the weekend.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

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.