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cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 27 2005
by CoffeePot
Are you overwhelmed by the sheer volume on astro-ph and/or hep-ph and/or hep-th each day?
Might you be missing important cosmology papers because of the difficulty of identifying relevant papers from the long lists?
Would you find it helpful if there were an easy way of seeing the cosmology papers all in one place?

One way might be to ask arxiv for a new archive for cosmology papers, e.g. cosmo-ph. Would you like there to be a cosmo-ph?

Another possibility might be to ask for subject classes throughout astro-ph, like on the condensed matter arxiv, see e.g. http://arxiv.org/archive/cond-mat. It would then be necessary agree on the divisions between the subjects on astro-ph.

Do you feel there is a problem with the current system but that cosmo-ph or subject classes are not the solution? If so, how else might this problem be addressed in a practical way?

Note: you must be logged in to vote - then you will see a "submit vote" button above.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 27 2005
by Sarah Bridle
I voted for cosmo-ph because I'm worried it would take forever to come to a concensus on subject classes through astro-ph, and I'd really like a solution to the problem sooner rather than later.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 27 2005
by Tarun Souradeep
Sounds like a good idea to have cosmo-ph! Just because of the large volume of astro-ph
submissions. A problem though is that soon you get completely dissociated from the other
(even mother) arXiv. In the early days, I used to look at hep-ph and gr-qc listings too
(even after astro-ph came into being) but now only papers crosslisted to astro-ph are
what I am aware of ...

An alternative possiblity may be to allow/require users to provide keywords with their
submissions and the allow keyword based searches. It would be good to have preset
keywords to be chosen from a menu. I feel even a simple two level keword system will
suffice to cut down the number of papers one may want track closely to manageable
numbers. The keywords should be required even for cross-listing to astro-ph.

Tarun

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 27 2005
by Syksy Rasanen
A division into subject classes (e.g. along the lines of solar system, galaxies, cosmology, maybe with a theory/observation divide at least for cosmology?) would be ideal. Following what you're interested in would be easier than with a single new archive, and the system would be more flexible and simpler to change than a single new archive.

As an aside, does anyone else feel that the qc in gr-qc is a bit out of place? Having a group for gr (and other gravity) work is good, but the cosmology side would in my opinion be better subsumed into astro-ph subject classes.

Does anyone know what arxiv is planning? I asked them about this year and a half ago, and the reply was that this is "a high-priority topic" and that "We are currently working out alternatives to the single astro-ph archive; unfortunately, it may be some time before the change is implemented".

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Jochen Weller
I am fine as it is.
Introducing another archive would only mean I have to scan a 4th arXive
instead of just looking through astro-ph, hep-th and gr-qc.
Of course in an ideal world I only had to look at one arXive but I doubt
this is possible, because everybody has different opinions if their paper
is astro-ph, hep-th or gr-qc. Cross referencing does also not always work and usually appears too late.
Another arXive would only complicate things even more.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Guest
I vote no, I'd like a different solution. I think I'd find cosmo-ph a bit restrictive, and would be worried that I'd miss interesting things by not getting the full listing... I suspect that a cosmology subject class would also allow papers to slip through the gaps. What I want is a system where I get to define my own set of intersts and then only read astro-ph submissions on them.

So -

I get the daily email, but filter it into a folder called "astroph-daily". My mail agent (Pine) actually just concatenates it to a big text file which I can then grep:

grep -e "Paper:" -e "cross-listing" -e "Title:" -e "Authors:" ~/mail/astroph-daily

is a good one for making a condensed version. Up until now I have tended to search (repeatedly) for kewords within "more", which works reasonably well but could be better.

Maybe I should write a perl script that matches a *user-defined set of abstract keywords* to the contents of ~/mail/astroph-daily, and returns an abbreviated posting. If I get more than three responses from cosmo-coffee asking for such a script I'll write one. Or someone with a lower threshold could do it now!

Interestingly, arXiv prevents you downloading html versions of the new/recent/etc posting summaries:

> wget http://xxx.arxiv.org/list/astro-ph/recent
--14:21:55-- http://xxx.arxiv.org/list/astro-ph/recent
=> `recent'
Resolving xxx.arxiv.org... done.
Connecting to xxx.arxiv.org[132.236.180.11]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
14:21:55 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

so you can't periodically scrape the arXiv site for new and interesting things. At least they didn't set their rampaging robot on me.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Phil Marshall
The perl script offer was from me by the way.

A bit of discussion around KIPAC found many people just scanning the recent postings on the web; one more advanced method was to bookmark ADS at a search for the last 100 entries (the automatic output) containing one of the specified abstract keywords. The ADS search engine seems quite clever, probably better than any Perl script I would write!

One disadvantage of this is that you keep being shown the same entries.

Is anyone else doing anything better than this?

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Anze Slosar
Speaking of perl-scripts and such: A co-worker of mine has coded up an arxiv-reader which is a gtk clickey-clockey program for reading astro-ph and similar. Go to http://www.fiz.uni-lj.si/~prsa and click on arxiv-reader on the menu on the left. In principle, one could extend that so that it would pick keywords and stuff.

Personally, I prefer just reading the listing, my brain does all the pattern recognition fairly effectivelly...

As far as cosmo-ph is concerned, there is a lot of stuff at the boundary... Do you count galaxy evolution as cosmology or astronomy? (especially if cosmological mass functions etc are used)

Re: cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Syksy Rasanen
Jochen Weller wrote: Introducing another archive would only mean I have to scan a 4th arXive
instead of just looking through astro-ph, hep-th and gr-qc.
Of course in an ideal world I only had to look at one arXive but I doubt
this is possible, because everybody has different opinions if their paper
is astro-ph, hep-th or gr-qc.
Introducing subject classes would make it easier, not more difficult, to focus on the papers one is interested in. (And also to choose which archive/class to submit to.)

While there are significant areas of overlap between, say, hep-th and astro-ph, there are also areas where the overlap is small. For example, the vast majority of galaxy , stellar and planetary physics papers are of no interest to me, and likewise I doubt whether most galaxy physicists like to wade through brane cosmology stuff.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Guest
Hi all,
the proposal for a cosmo preprint arxiv is very interesting, I think it might have on the long term an impact also on the trend in research topics, since having a dedicated archive could imply more focus on specific cosmological issues.....however cosmology is at the cross-road between astronomy and particle physics so one is also interested in what is going on at least in the astro and theory archive....so I agree with Jochen, having another archive would mean checking 5 (astro,gr-qc,ph,th+cosmo) and not just 4 at least for me. A possible solution? I would strongly suggest not to post cosmology oriented preprints on gr-qc and ph which I find more related to GR technical aspects and Particle Phenomenology. But I am sure many people would disagree.
So I vote no to cosmo-ph.
Cheers

Pier-Stefano

Re: cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Antony Lewis
I wonder if the arxiv could enforce PACs subject classes for each submission. Authors have to find these anyway for Phys Rev papers, and using them would allow some form of automated collection of relevant papers through all the different arxives. These subject classes are at least well established already.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 28 2005
by Sarah Bridle
To copy some of the relevant bits of the PACS site here.
The cosmology bits are at the bottom of http://www.aip.org/pacs/pacs03/pacs0390-ext.html

98.80.-k Cosmology

98.80.Bp Origin and formation of the Universe
98.80.Cq Particle-theory and field-theory models of the early Universe (including cosmic pancakes, cosmic strings, chaotic phenomena, inflationary universe, etc.)
98.80.Es Observational cosmology including Hubble constant, distance scale, cosmological constant, early Universe, etc
98.80.Ft Mathematical and relativistic aspects of cosmology; quantum cosmology
98.80.Jk Mathematical and relativistic aspects of cosmology
98.80.Qc Quantum cosmology

But see also the other extragalactic topics, towards the bottom of the page linked above.
Looks good to me.

Would you then allow several subject classes per paper??
If so, there is potentially confusing jargon here..
* PACS subject classes: a list of topics
* splitting e.g. astro-ph into subject classes (as for condensed matter): a way of splitting up the arxiv into sections

Would there be an outcry because people wouldn't want to have to do this? Presumably not, because as you say, people are used to doing this for journals anyway. In fact it is the arxiv which is the odd one out here for not having them!

Would be nice if there were an easy button to click so you could look at all papers with given subject class(es).

If you can assign several subject classes per paper then this circumvents a lot of the criticisms of splitting the archive into separate subject classes (as in condensed matter) or having cosmo-ph.

Also this would help with the hep-ph, hep-th, astro-ph overlap problems raised above.

Where does this stand in the voting? I guess it is option number 4? I want to change my vote! Don't know a way to do this with this software. I guess if you already voted but feel strongly about this new option then it would be useful if you could post something.

cosmo-ph?

Posted: April 29 2005
by Antonio C. C. Guimaraes
It seems that the problem is more of search than of classification. If there was a tool that daily searched for you *all* the arXivs for papers with a personal set of key words and subjects, then there would be no need for extra divisions and it would be less likely for someone to lose a paper of interest.

Re: cosmo-ph?

Posted: May 02 2005
by Antony Lewis
You may have noticed the new CosmoCoffee page

http://cosmocoffee.info/arxiv_new.php

you can test out.

It would be more reliable if arxiv had PACs codes or some other classification scheme, but seems to work OK with key words. Comments/suggestions/bug reports welcome.

There is also a similar thing available by email from ADS:

http://myads.harvard.edu/

(but doesn't directly give abstract information).

cosmo-ph?

Posted: May 02 2005
by Phil Marshall
Hey Antony, this is great! Much better than my homegrown Perl would have been. Thank you very much!

If you fancied spending even more time on this (!), would it be possible to
highlight the keywords in the text of the abstracts?
I've seen this done elsewhere, eg.

http://www.camk.edu.pl/~gwar/astro-ph/2003.09.24.html

and it makes for a very efficient scan...