Introduction to INSPIRE

This document will introduce you to the INSPIRE database. From here you will find links to more in depth information on tools used by catalogers and the metadata requirements of each type of record.

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What is INSPIRE?

INSPIRE is the leading information platform for High Energy Physics (HEP) literature which provides users with high quality, curated content covering the entire corpus of HEP literature and the fulltext of all such articles that are Open Access.

INSPIRE empowers scientists with new tools to discover and access the results most relevant to their research; enables novel text-and data-mining applications and new metrics to assess the impact of articles and authors.

INSPIRE is a collaboration among four High Energy Physics laboratories: CERN, DESY, Fermilab, IHEP, IN2P3, and SLAC.

INSPIRE’s main focus is particle physics, but it does contain content from related strongly fields, including nuclear physics, astrophysics, accelerators, detectors, condensed matter physics, gravitation and cosmology. Our collection policy is located here.

See more information here about INSPIRE and it’s users.

 

Content in INSPIRE

INSPIRE is divided into eight collections, each containing different types of content: Literature, which contains papers; Authors, which contains work history of authors, Institutions, Conferences, Jobs, Experiments, Journals, and Data.

There are three ways HEP Literature content is added to INSPIRE: automatic harvesting, user submission, and manual additions from INSPIRE staff.

INSPIRE automatically harvests articles from arXiv and journal feeds from select publishers. Papers from arXiv are added daily, while papers published in journals are typically added two to three weeks after the article has been published. The published records are merged with the corresponding preprint records.

Due to the high volume of records added everyday, we must prioritize some material. CORE records (having to do with particle physics) are fully curated by catalogers, while NONCORE records receive minimal curation.

 

Record structure

All records in INSPIRE follow JSON metadata structure. Each piece of metadata is housed in a specific field, often with several subfields. For the full list of fields and subfields used, see the Schema Documentation.

 

Cataloging procedures and tools

Cataloging procedures differ by collection and material type. For specifics, see Metadata by collection. The first thing to check before adding any record is for a duplicate record in INSPIRE. For INSPIRE search tips, see https://inspirehep.net/help/knowledge-base/inspire-paper-search/.

Due to the high volume of records added every day, we must prioritize some material. CORE records (having to do with particle physics) are fully curated by catalogers, while NONCORE records receive minimal curation. We must balance accuracy with efficiency. Reference corrections, for example, can take a long time if you attempt to fix every JSON subfield in every reference.

RT is a ticketing system that tracks incoming user communications, including requests, questions, and submissions. Tickets are split into queues depending on their point of origin. Your RT account is separate from your INSPIRE account, so you will need to be logged into both systems in order to use them.

For all collections catalogers most often use Bibedit to edit records. Bibedit provides a user interface to add, delete, and update JSON fields. It contains Refextract, which can extract references from a pdf or text file and convert them into JSON format.

As of 2020-4-13, the following tools are not yet available:

Bibmerge is used to merge two records that represent the same item (e.g. a preprint and a published version).

If the same information in the same JSON field must be updated in multiple records, Multiedit can be used.

For editing or adding records in bulk, use Batch uploader. This can handle MARC and MARC XML formats.

To add files to a record, such as a full text pdf or a figure, use File manager or FFT in bibedit.

 

Metadata and curation by collection

 

Tools

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