HEP Help

Finding Index to view all of the search options.

Additional information on sorting, viewing, policies and general SPIRES searching

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick Example Searches

• find author weinberg, s and title cosmolog# and date after 1995
• find t symmetry or asymmetry and a gell-mann and not t quantum
• find cc japan and topcite 100+ and fc t

Finding a Paper in HEP

Author

fin a Peskin   fin a Ellis, J. R.   fin a Quinn, Helen
Use "a" or "author" to search for the authors as printed on the paper.
Extensive help is available on our author searching page.

Title

Enter any or all words from the title in any order. Adjacent words in your search will be treated as "and" searches. A truncated search may be used, for example:
fin t microproces#
The keyword index is now the preferred method to find papers by "subject". If you are searching title=proton because you want to find papers about protons, try searching keyword=proton instead, you'll get more results.
Treat parentheses as though they don't exist (e.g. SUN for SU(N)), or enclose them in double quotes.
Common words (the, and, or, if) will be ignored
Spellings follow American English conventions (analyze, color, renormalization)but most common English variants will work as well
There are certain phrases we try to maintain consistently, here are some examples.
The dash means the entire string must be used in the search. So
fin title Seiberg Witten
will not give you nearly as many results as:
fin title Seiberg-Witten
Alternatively, use the truncation symbol:
fin title Seib#

Journal

fin j PRLTA   fin j phys.rev.lett.
You can use either a common abbreviation for the journal, or the 5 letter CODEN abbreviation found in the CODEN database.
You can use the volume and page as well.
fin j Phys. Rev.,D54,1   fin j EPHJA,C23
Note that the correct form is Journal,volume,page(optional) and that the letter is part of the volume.

Eprint number

Old Style ids:fin bb hep-ph/0001001   New Style ids:fin bb arxiv:0704.0015   fin eprint 0704.0015
With new style IDs, you may wish to look at arx (includes crosslists) or parx (only primary) to determine the archive (parx and arx both suffer long lag times in searching. This is a fundamental bug in SPIRES design that we are slowly working towards rectifying, however these searches may work spottily, or not at all):
fin bb 0704 and parx hep-th
You can also type an (old style) eprint number directly into the main search box with no other text.

Report Number

fin r slac-pub-10001
fin r UWTHPH
The publication number of a preprint or report. What is typed must exactly match the entry's number to yield the entry. However, commonly used symbols in report numbers such as / and - may be freely interchanged with a blank space.
You can also use the truncation symbol, 
fin r slac-r#

Date

There are several options:
find dadd 10/1994
finds the date the paper was added to SPIRES-HEP
find jy 1978
finds the year it was published in a journal
find a witten and date 1998
this date must be combined with another search
it is taken from (in order of preference) the date on title page, date of conference, date published, date received

Topcite

Short for Top Citations, which finds papers with greater than 1,000 citations (topcite 1000+), 500 citations (topcite 500+), 100 citation (topcite 100+), and 50 citations (topcite 50+). For illustrative purposes, the following examples are done with citation format.

• find author bjorken and topcite 500+
• find aff princeton u. and topcite 1000+
• find title quark and topcite 500+
• find topcite 1000+
• find author gell-mann and topcite 50+ not topcite 100+

The HEP preprint database has over 550,000 records and just under 20,000 of these have more than 50 citations (~4%). The usual caveats about citation counting apply here.

Citations

You can easily find the citations of papers if you know the journal CODEN. For example
find c phrva,d66,085002
finds the citations of Phys.Rev.D 66,085002. This works similarly for eprints e.g.,
fin c ASTRO-PH 0001008
This works whether the cited paper is in HEP or not, as long as the citing paper is in HEP, you'll find it.
You can also find the paper first, using the normal format, then click on "Citation Search"
The usual caveats about citation counting apply here. You may be interested in our methods for counting cites, and what you can do to help us.

Affiliation

find aff Adelaide U.
These are as listed on the title page of the paper, using the SPIRES name for the institution, which can be found in the the Institutions database
We usually do not include the affiliation when someone is "on leave from."

Experiment

find exp opal
This exp index breaks the exact experiment number, CERN-LEP-OPAL, into pieces, allowing you to also search find exp lep which finds, CERN-LEP-OPAL, CERN-LEP-DELPH, CERN-LEP-ALEPH, CERN-LEP-L3.
The exact-experiment element requires the exact experiment number
find ee CERN-LEP-OPAL.
Collaboration name can also be used,
find cn D0
which finds all FNAL-E-0740 papers that were authored by the collaboration. Other papers associated with the experiment, but not listed as "by the" or "for the" collaboration are not found by this search.
A good place to start for any experiment search is the Experiments database. All experiments there are linked to their papers in HEP.

Keywords

find k compton scattering
or
find k accelerator
Note that the search index is k not key or dk.
As of 7/26/04, the keyword index has changed, and more changes will follow. Currently k or keyword searches the desy-keywords described below, as well as searching the title of the paper and any keywords the author may have written on the paper (only available for papers in Aug 2004 or later). This means that while there is a time lag for the desy-keywords to be applied, due to the hard work taking place at DESY, more recent papers will still be found by the keyword search.
This index, keyword, is now the preferred method to find papers by "subject". If you are searching title=proton because you want to find papers about protons, try searching keyword=proton instead, you'll get more results. The only reason to use title is if you know the title of the one paper you are looking for.
The dk or desy-keyword index described in the next section behaves like the keyword index did before 7/26/04.

DESY-Keywords

find dk accelerator, control system
or
find dk accelerator#
Note that the search index is dk not key or k.
A sequence of words can only be searched as this sequence. They are often given in pairs, separated by ", " e.g. accelerator, control system. Such a combination of keywords can be found in 3 ways:

• fin dk accelerator, control system
• fin dk accelerator
• fin dk control system

On the other hand,
find dk accelerator control system
will not work because the comma is missing.
The keywords are added from a controlled list of about 2000. To find the keywords you're really interested in you can browse the keyword index. You may shorten the word - without any truncation symbol.

Enter a relevant term to find the right keyword
Enter value:

Or you can find a paper you like, and click on its Keywords link (right after the BibTeX record). Those keywords will help you find other related papers.
The complete list of keyword can be found here. They are added by DESY physicists under the guidance of the DESY Library staff.

Subjects

The HEP database has the following subject classes which must be used with some other a search. These can also be seen as SCL rather than PS in some searches.
published (peer-reviewed/non-conference- see our def. of published) PS=P
review papers PS=R
theory papers PS=T
phenomenology papers PS=E,T
experimental papers PS=E
instrument/accelerator papers PS=I

• fin title duality and strong and ps P
• fin title strong coupling and ps T not ps E finds theory papers only
• fin title strong coupling and ps E,T finds phenomenology papers only
• fin title strong coupling and ps E not ps T finds experimental papers only
• fin t tau and ps I finds instrument papers only
• fin t chiral symmetry and ps R finds review papers

We are moving away from using the T and E codes, and beginning to use Field and Type codes below. However, PS will still be a useful search for some time as we begin to code the papers using fc and tc below

Field-Code

You can now find papers on various topics by using fc:
fin aff SLAC and fc a SPIRES staff classifies all new papers using these codes:

• A  astrophysics  (astro-ph)
• B  accelerators  (physics/acc-phys)
• C  computing   (cs.xx)
• E  HEP experiment  (hep-ex)
• G  gravitation and cosmology (gr-qc)
• I  instrumentation 
• L  lattice (hep-lat)
• M  math and math physics (math.xx,math-ph)
• N  nuclear physics theory (nucl-th)
• O  other 
• P  HEP phenomenology (hep-ph)
• Q  general physics (cond-mat, quant-ph, physics)
• T  HEP theory (hep-th)
• X  Nuclear Physics experiment (nucl-ex)

Some arXives, as noted, are automatically classified in certain groups, papers not submitted to arXiv, or in a more general arXiv are classified by hand.

Type-Code

You can search for papers of a certain type using type:
fin aff SLAC and type R

•    B  book
•    I  introductory (i.e. non-technical)
•    L  lectures
•    R  review
•    C  talk (i.e. conference papers)
•    T  thesis
•    P  published (see our def. of published)

Note that these overlap with PS. These codes are only available on new papers, though we hope to apply them retroactively in the future.

Country

The cc allows you to search by country. The country is defined as the country of the institution where the work was done.
find cc united kingdom and t optical

Errata

Errata can be specifically found using the search e.g.
find j errat,a608,514
if say, you were looking to the erratum published in, say, Phys. Rev. D54 (1996) 345 (not the original article).
You can also find all errata (with Boolean combinations of other searches):
fin a ellis,j and j errat

texkey

Find articles based on the key we provide for LaTeX and BibTeX references (see Biblio Tools

• find texkey alwall:2007ed
• find texkey kachru:2007#

Remember that these should not change after the first assignment (unless we discover a non-unique one). You can generally guess most of the key if you know the first author and date, but you can't always. A better search is find fa Kachru and date 2007 if you are just looking for papers.

Finding Index