Beginning in June of 2002, we have been adding the entire contents of the astro-ph arXiv to HEP. As of March 2003 there are over 41,000 astro-ph papers in SPIRES-HEP, the entire contents of the arXiv to date. There is of course a lot of material not strictly related to HEP in this arXiv, but the additional labor required to sort the HEP-related from the HEP-unrelated was becoming less worthwhile as the fields of astrophysics and HEP became more and more entwined, and more and more papers on astro-ph were becoming of interest to SPIRES-HEP users. We have also implemented cross links to ADS which should help you to find papers that are more astrophysical in nature. We hope this service is useful, and we welcome feedback on it at library@slac.stanford.edu.

The astro-ph papers are treated somewhat differently in input to SPIRES-HEP. SPIRES-HEP entry from arXiv is a two-step process, with an automated component which produces the temporary entry and a manual cleaning up of names, titles, affiliations, and references which produces the complete record. The astro-ph papers are input as usual for the first step, but the second step is handled differently than the other arXiv’s. The Fermilab Library handles the cleanup of the records and citations. At the moment the citations are not handled as carefully as the other arXiv’s, for technical and manpower reasons, but also because a large percentage of the citations are to articles outside of the HEP field. If you would like to help us enter your citations correctly, please see our help page for references.

Of course, feedback and corrections are always welcome here, and also regarding publication information that we may have missed for these papers.