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Authorship

How can I make sure my publication list on INSPIRE is correct?

How can I create an authors.xml file to ensure my paper’s authors and their affiliations are handled correctly?

The author publication profile page says “Unknown” for my affiliation – what can I do?

What is ORCID?

How do I connect my ORCID iD to my INSPIRE Author Profile?

How can I include my ORCID on a paper?

I manage a large author list, e.g. for an experiment. Does INSPIRE have any tools to help me with this?

Why do some works get a lot of separate records for the sections in INSPIRE?

References/Citations

Why is the number of citations different in the new INSPIRE version?

I lost many citations. Can you fix it?

What causes differences in citation counts between the old and new INSPIRE?

How can I correct a reference/citation or add a missing reference list?

Can I get more citation metrics?

The INSPIRE search results display says my paper has X citations but when I click on that link, the result is slightly less than X. Why is that and which is correct?

Why is my citation count lower than in Google Scholar/ScienceDirect/Web of Science…?

Can I see citations per number of authors on the paper?

What does citable papers, self-citations, h-index, etc. mean?

Why do some papers receive citations from the past?

Formats

How do I get the CV/Citesummary/BibTeX/etc. output format?

How do I generate a properly ordered LaTeX/BibTeX bibliography from my LaTeX file? How do I convert a LaTeX bibliography to a BibTeX bibliography?

How do I handle utf-8 encoded accented characters in BibTeX/LaTeX entries (and why don’t you just use traditional TeX encoding)?

Miscellaneous

Can anyone sign up for an ORCID?

What does “published” mean in INSPIRE?

From where does INSPIRE get its content?

I tried logging in with my ORCID but got caught in a loop. What should I do?

I want to do automated searching and receive machine readable responses. Do you have an API?

 

 

Authorship

Q. How can I make sure my publication list on INSPIRE is correct?

A. You can claim your publications on INSPIRE by using the person search facility. This profile page has links to papers, a citation summary, lists of co-authors and many more features. It also has a link to claim your publications, reject the ones that are not yours or add the ones we miss. If you need help or have questions – please contact us, authors@inspirehep.net

Q. The author publication profile page says “Unknown” for my affiliation – what can I do?

A. Please let us know (authors@inspirehep.net) and we will change it.

Q. How can I include my ORCID on a paper?

A. There is not currently a standardized way of including an ORCID on a paper. One possible method is to include it in the TeX file using the tag \thanks{}, which can display clickable links.

\author{P. Smith}
\email{psmith@fnal.gov}
\thanks{ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0001}
\affiliation{Fermilab, IL, USA}
\author{Q. Jones}
\email{jones@slac.stanford.edu}
\thanks{ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0002}
\affiliation{SLAC, CA, USA}
\author{R. Brown}
\email{brown@slac.stanford.edu}
\thanks{ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0003}
\affiliation{SLAC, CA, USA}


Q. I manage a large author list, e.g. for an experiment. Does INSPIRE have any tools to help me with this?

A. INSPIRE has an author management tool that allows you to easily remove authors, change affiliations, generate new author XML files, and create TeX files in Elsevier and APS format. If you would like to use this tool, please contact authors@inspirehep.net, and we’ll get you set up. The first step is to get INSPIRE IDs for all authors in your collaboration and create an author.xml file. More information on this can be found here.

Q. Why do some works get a lot of separate records for the sections in INSPIRE?

A. INSPIRE aims to both make individual works findable and give authors credit for their work. We have a long-standing policy of handling conference proceedings, and similar works, by creating records for all the individual contributions complete with their authors, titles, and reference lists, in addition to the creating a single record for the parent document. To avoid double-counting, the parent record lists only the editors and other volume-wide authors and no references. However, we only do this if each contribution is self-contained; it must have both its own author list and its own reference list. If these two conditions are not met, we will only have a single record in INSPIRE for the work.

References / Citations

Q. Why is the number of citations different in the new INSPIRE version?

Citation counts can differ between the old and the new INSPIRE platform due to technical differences in the process that connects the citing and cited records. In the vast majority of cases, citation counts are more accurate on the new platform as we fixed several issues affecting the old system.

About half of the author profiles don’t see any citation loss, 95% see less than 1% loss, and 99% of author profiles lose less than 5% of their citations in the transition from the old to the new INSPIRE. This is within the expected error margin for citation tracking in INSPIRE.

Citation loss Author profiles
None (or a gain in citations) 50%
< 1% 95%
< 5% 99%

Q. I lost many citations. Can you fix it?

Given our limited resources, we can’t manually inspect and fix all errors. However, we realize that having accurate citation counts that can be trusted by the community is a crucial feature. This is why citation counts for outliers who lose more than 5% of their citations will be corrected if a detailed report is sent to feedback@inspirehep.net.

This report must mention:

  1. Which author profile is affected by the loss
  2. Which of their papers have lost citations
  3. Which papers used to cite your papers and now don’t

Please also check that the citations that disappeared are genuine citations by looking at the references of the citing paper on arXiv or the publisher website and not the symptom of bugs in the old system.

Q. What causes differences in citation counts between the old and new INSPIRE?

The old system has several sources of inconsistencies in the way it counts citations.

The root cause of many of them is that when a new record gets created or a record gets updated, the database is searched for both the records it cites and the records that cite it.

Some normalization and consistency checks are done only in one direction (citing record -> cited record), leading to an asymmetry and a different outcome when an update later causes the count to be computed from the other direction. The new INSPIRE always matches citations from citing record to cited record, which eliminates this class of inconsistencies.

The effect is particularly pronounced when an element of a reference matches several records. Due to the ambiguity, the citing->cited lookup conservatively doesn’t attribute any citation, whereas the other direction has no such safeguard. This happens when a report number is non-unique (e.g. CERN-2004-003 refers to 3 different volumes of the LHC Design Report) or when several records share the same journal title, volume and starting page as often occurs with errata.

Similarly, when a single reference is ambiguous because it refers to multiple records (e.g. the arXiv ID corresponds to one record but the journal information to another one), the old system considers it as a citation to all of them, whereas the new system will only count a citation for a single record, using the information that is the most likely to be accurate (arXiv ID in this case). We are working on improving the reference metadata to resolve this issue.

Q. How can I correct a reference/citation or add a missing reference list?

A. You can do so by using our textmining form https://old.inspirehep.net/textmining. Reference extraction works by identifying something unique in the reference string that can be resolved as a work, usually:

  1. eprint number
  2. DOI
  3. journal name, volume, page number
  4. report number
  5. ISBN

So, if Refextract isn’t working it’s because it can’t find any of those. The solution is to add one of these identifiers for your work in the reference string, and then it will catch it. For example:
bad:
R.~Brun et al., “GEANT Detector Description and Simulation Tool,” CERN writeup.
Fixed:
R.~Brun et al., “GEANT Detector Description and Simulation Tool,” CERN writeup 10.17181/CERN.MUHF.DMJ1

Once you have done a first pass, if references were missed just copy the extracted references into the text box, fixing any mistakes (e.g. wrong volume or page number you may have to add a missing eprint number), and iterate until all the references are correctly extracted and linked in blue (at least those that are in INSPIRE). Note that each reference should be on its own line (or clearly distinguished by a semi-colon). Then send this final text list of references to help@inspirehep.net with the matching url of the record (e.g. https://old.inspirehep.net/record/852339) and we will update the reference list of the record. Please note that our cataloger resources are currently down, and we will update references as time allows.

Note that any reference that has a blue link in the existing INSPIRE record should also have a blue link in your version. So please check the reference page for a record and make sure you have everything, e.g.
https://old.inspirehep.net/record/227338/references

If you have any difficulties with this, please contact us at help@inspirehep.net.

Q. Can I get more citation metrics?

A. Many metrics are available on the author publication profile pages. You can also view the citation summary of any HEP Literature search by clicking the toggle next to the sorting options at the top.


Q. The INSPIRE search results display says my paper has X citations but when I click on that link, the result is slightly less than X. Why is that and which is correct?

A. The citation count in the brief display is an approximation which sometimes overcounts by a small number due to citations from records which are later merged into other records and/or deleted. This is a speed optimization for display purposes in long result sets and not easily addressed. It will be fixed in the next iteration of INSPIRE, but we don’t have a timeline for this yet. For now, please send us feedback (feedback@inspirehep.net) when you notice significant discrepancies.

In the meantime, the accurate number is given when the actual search refersto:recid:nnn is performed. For example, citations for Maldacena’s paper The Large N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity (recid 451647) can be found with refersto:recid:451647.

Q. Why is my citation count lower than in Google Scholar/ScienceDirect/Web of Science…?

A. There are several reasons why INSPIRE’s citation counts may be lower than those of external sources, like Google Scholar:
INSPIRE only counts citations from other records within INSPIRE. Since INSPIRE is highly selective to papers within High Energy Physics, citations from papers outside HEP are usually not covered.

  • INSPIRE does not possess the reference lists from older journal articles that we did not originally receive in preprint form. [See below for our plans to improve this.]
  • We sometimes miss references that were added in a revised version.
  • Although we invest considerable effort to discover HEP theses, our coverage in this area is far from complete.
  • Google scholar sometimes over-counts by listing a preprint and the corresponding journal article separately.

We’re working to improve the completeness of our citation coverage in several ways:

  • We’re working with publishers to add missing reference lists for older journal articles, but this will take time. In the interim, we don’t have the staff resources to fulfill requests from individual users to complete their citation lists. (But see the next item.)
  • We are improving our workflow to better handle revised versions.
  • We are investigating the possibility of displaying citation counts from external sources, e.g. from ADS.

Q. Can I see citations per number of authors on the paper?

A. Usually people asking for this just want to exclude collaborations from the search. To do this, you can use the authorcount feature.

Q. Why do some papers receive citations from the past?

A. Some records in INSPIRE have citations from records with an earlier date than the cited paper. This is not necessarily a sign that INSPIRE violates causality. Since we have a single record for preprint, published article and multiple versions, there can be several dates in a record. Although the references might be updated, the earliest date is used in the record. Also no database is bug-free, sometimes we just have incorrect information in records. If you come across a mistake in our metadata, please report it to help@inspirehep.net.

Formats

Q. How do I get the CV/Citesummary/BibTeX/etc. output format?

A. The citesummary of any search can be found using the toggle at the top of the search results (see Q. Can I get more citation metrics? above). Click ‘cite’ at the bottom of each search result entry/full record to get the BibTeX and LaTeX of that record. ‘Cite all’ at the top of the search give BibTeX or LaTeX output for the full search results up to 1000 entries.

Q. How do I generate a properly ordered LaTeX/BibTeX bibliography from my LaTeX file? How do I convert a LaTeX bibliography to a BibTeX bibliography?

A. See Generating Your Bibliography.

Q. How do I handle utf-8 encoded accented characters in BibTeX/LaTeX entries (and why don’t you just use traditional TeX encoding)?

A. In the interest of extended character support for title and author display it is preferable to use utf-8, so INSPIRE gives output such as Väänänen (instead of V\"a\"an\"anen). Note that big commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer also export BibTeX records with utf-8. Therefore using BibTeX/LaTeX in a utf-8 enabled way is already unavoidable when including entries from various sources.

When using LaTeX, add this line to the preamble of your file: \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Since native utf-8 support in BibTeX is mostly limited to code points which can be encoded in one byte, the general trend is to migrate to BibLaTeX and biber, which can handle the full range of utf-8 (Unicode 6.0).

Miscellaneous

Q. Can anyone sign up for an ORCID?

A. Yes. Although ORCID is primarily intended for identifying researchers, anyone can register for an ORCID. INSPIRE requires an ORCID for certain actions such as suggesting content or posting a position to HEPJobs because it provides a simple login mechanism that enables users to later update records by themselves, without INSPIRE staff having to do anything.

To sign up for an ORCID go to https://orcid.org/register. We recommend including your full name, rather than just initials, and your current institution to make it easier to identify your ORCID when you want it in the future.

Q. What does “published” mean in INSPIRE?

A. “Published” means that the article has appeared in one of the principal refereed journals serving high energy physics and astrophysics. Solicited reviews in journals such as Reviews of Modern PhysicsPhysics Reports, the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, and the reviews section of the International Journal of Modern Physics are also listed as “published.”. Articles in conference proceedings are not listed as “published”; this usage includes conference proceedings supplementary volumes of journals, for example, the proceedings supplements of Nuclear Physics B.

The primary measure of a researcher’s contribution to science is the production of relevant, original research. In HEP this is largely determined in the publication process of the major refereed journals such as JHEPPhysical Review D and Physics Letters B, where only papers of sufficiently high quality are accepted and previously published research is per se rejected. We therefore follow this philosophy and only attach the tag “published” to papers that appear in such journals. This screening necessitates both a high rejection rate and lengthy review period that would typically rule out a journal issue devoted to a conference proceedings, which operates on a fixed time-frame and seeks to include a majority of the papers presented at the conference.

An exception to the condition of originality is the review articles published in journals such as Physics Reports and Reviews of Modern Physics. Here the author has demonstrated sufficient mastery of a topic of such importance that it is of interest to a wider audience. In this synthesis of the history and particular issues of the topic a genuine contribution to science has been made. Nevertheless, these articles are always tagged as “review” to distinguish them from original research.

Naturally, there can still be papers presenting original research of exceptionally high quality which never appeared in a journal. These papers, however, will not be tagged “published” in INSPIRE.

Summary: In INSPIRE, “published” means the article has appeared in a major, refereed journal and presents new results.

Q: From where does INSPIRE get its content?

A. Please see our content sources page for a list of major sources.

Q: I tried logging in with my ORCID but got caught in a loop. What should I do?

A. You need to clear your cookies for the site labs.inspirehep.net. Instructions for this can be found here.

Q: I want to do automated searching and receive machine readable responses. Do you have an API?

A. Our API is currently in development, so stay tuned for updates.

 

 

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