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Warning about Citation Searching

The citation search should be used and interpreted with great care. Citations in INSPIRE-HEP are gathered only from the papers in our database that have references entered electronically via eprints or journal articles. Non-eprinted papers are difficult for us due to manpower constraints. The citations we do collect are subject to many forms of error, from typographical errors in the source paper, to errors in our parsing of the reference, to errors due to some nonstandard reference formats. Publications such as monographs or conference proceedings are treated inconsistently, both in the literature and in our database. Thus citations to these works can be up to date, completely missing, or somewhere in between.

It should also be noted that we are primarily concerned with High Energy Physics and do not typically include papers outside of direct interest to this field. If you usually publish in, say, condensed matter physics, but have written a few papers in HEP both your publication history and citation counts will be unreliable in INSPIRE. In the future we may show citation counts from other services on our author publication profile pages, which will help this situation.

These are just a few of the challenges that any attempt to track citations confronts. There will always be errors in citation counts in INSPIRE-HEP and in other databases.

Our best defense against these errors is you, the user.

  • If you want to ensure that your references are entered correctly, use INSPIRE-HEP to generate LaTeX references
  • If you are having problems in INSPIRE-HEP, please notify us at help@inspirehep.net, or refer to our Help pages for instructions on what to do if you find a problem

Please also see our note regarding our definition of published


SPIRES HEP was a joint project of SLAC, DESY & FNAL as well as the worldwide HEP community.
It was superseeded by INSPIRE

Last Updated: 01/31/2005

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