As many of you probably know, the place to look for references in High Energy Physics for as long as I can remember has been hosted by the SPIRES website, hosted at SLAC. In the last few year the system has become slow and clunky and I have heard various complaints about it. There is a mirror at Fermilab that works better, but it sometimes still freezes. The next generation of the search engine is called INSPIRE, and it is far superior to the SPIRES engine. This has ben jointly developed with CERN, I’m not sure who else is involved.
This week the SPIRES website is urging the visitors to move on and try INSPIRE. It is in beta testing (has been for a while and I have used it before), but now it seems to be working much faster.
One of the things that SPIRES had troubles with was citation counts. There are some double counts that appear in some places and not in some others and the results had an inherent noise in them.
INSPIRE seems to have corrected those issues and now the counts seem to match everywhere. I have not found anything broken with the new system yet, but I have not been pushing it either.
In any case, SPIRES is obsolete (has been for a while) and the transition is now. I think so far they have done a good job with the new software and the move to the new system is worthwhile.
I think the funniest catch phrase one can write about it is the title of this post:
Move to inspire.
It sounds like a slogan for a charity. Oh well.
[...] Berenstein and Motl have posted about the new HEP search engine INSPIRE which replaces the old and trusted SPIRES. INSPIRE can do everything SPIRES could, but better! or at least faster. But can it do anything new? yes it can. Try entering the search term “vixra” and you will get a list of all the HEP papers on viXra. These were also indexed by SPIRES, but as far as I know there was no way of searching for them all in one list. [...]