Here is probably the single most helpful thing I have ever done for the world. Last month Paul Ginsparg, who did a world-changing thing by inventing the arxiv system for sharing scientific preprints, was visiting Pasadena, and dropped by Caltech. We chatted a bit about blogs, the internet, the preprint server, ways one might incorporate links to blogs and talks and newspaper articles and all that (some of which already exists in the form of trackbacks). And he told me a fun math problem I will blog about at some point.
And then he asked, “Is there any other obvious way the arxiv could be improved?” To which I naturally responded, “You mean in addition to subdividing astro-ph into categories?”
The problem with science is that there’s just too damn much of it. Every weekday, when one peeks at the new listings on astro-ph, one is faced with 40 to 50 new abstracts to read. That’s a lot of science to wade through, and it’s especially bad for people who work on the boundaries and might also be interested in hep-th, gr-qc, hep-ph, and/or other categories. (I haven’t yet broken down and started reading quant-ph.) Especially since, just because you are interested in issues at the interfaces of conventionally-defined disciplinary boundaries, it doesn’t follow that you are interested in every single kind of research that is carried out in every one of those disciplines. An early-universe cosmologist, for example, might not be interested in star formation or the interstellar medium. Or they might be; but perhaps not.
Nevertheless, everything astronomy-related on the arxiv gets put into astro-ph, from models of inflation to light curves of W UMa contact binaries. And if one was interested only in some subset, one needed to sift through the 50 abstracts to search for the few that struck a chord.
Until now! Paul and Mark Wise and I chatted for ten minutes and came up with a perfectly sensible (I like to think) set of categories into which astro-oriented papers would mostly fall, and Paul went away promising to implement such a scheme. After chatting around with a few actual astrophysicists and fine-tuning the system, it’s now done! That wasn’t so hard, was it? (Part of the reason this hadn’t happened much earlier is that certain astrophysicists who will remain nameless took a “eat your vegetables” approach to the problem, insisting that it was good for anyone to look at every single astro-ph abstract if they were possibly interested in any of them.)
Here is what I was happy to find in my email just now:
By popular request, the Astrophysics (astro-ph) archive has been split into six subcategories:
CO Cosmology and Extra-Galactic Astrophysics
EP Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
GA Galactic Astrophysics
HE High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
IM Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
SR Solar and Stellar AstrophysicsFor more information, see the subcategory descriptions at http://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph (including links to the subdivided new and recent listings). This split should make announcements of new papers more manageable for those interested only in subsets of astro-ph. New astro-ph submissions must assigned one or more sub-categories. (Existing astro-ph articles will be machine-classified according to the new scheme when enough training data has been collected.)
To subscribe to the daily e-mail notifications for only a set of subcategories, you should first cancel your existing subscription, and then subscribe only to the subcategories of interest via physics. See http://arxiv.org/help/subscribe For example, you could send two emails
——–
To: astro-ph@arxiv.org
Subject: can——–
To: physics@arxiv.org
Subject: subscribe [Your Name]add CO
add GA
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Undoubtedly some curmudgeons will gripe that their particular kind of research doesn’t fit snugly into any one of the categories. Fair enough; let the powers that be know, and they’ll do whatever is reasonable to make sure the system evolves appropriately. But for right now, my early evenings (abstracts appear at 5 p.m. Pacific time) just got a little brighter.
Great, now we know where to re-direct packages from Ted Kaczynski.
yay. now the goal is to write a paper that can both be classifed under astro-ph.CO and astro-ph.EP
Great to see, I’ve pined for a more finely divided astro-ph for a long time too.
What I’ve always done before this was to use Yahoo Pipes to filter the astro-ph RSS feed into two main sub-feeds & several smaller ones. Of the two main sub-feeds, one is filtered to only contain abstracts with keywords I’m particularly interested in seeing & the other for everything else in the feed. That way I could always go over the “everything else” at a more leisurely pace than the keyworded abstracts, which get higher priority, & also keep the two feeds seperate in my Google Reader interface for ease of searching later.
Bah. Why on earth would they just not allow tagging of articles with user-created tags? Or even just fixed tags with (say) the ApJ categories? If you are going to implement some sort of categorization, why so limited and useless?
Thank you! I was just looking at the number next to astro-ph in my Google Reader and thinking it would soon be time once again to give up and hit “mark all as read”. Hopefully less of a problem now.
omg. this is the best news i’ve had since, well, itzykson and zuber was reissued by dover.
though, i think providing an early blogging voice was probably equally helpful to the world. well, the world of procrastinating grad students anyway.
“Is there any other obvious way the arxiv could be improved?”
You missed out on a golden opportunity to say, “Please go back to the old hep-th/97123456 names and drop the idiotic and uninformative naming system that you foisted on us a couple of years back. Oh, and tell your lackeys to be slightly more polite.”
Now that’s weird: I sort of thought ‘Galactic’ was about The Galaxy and that our very much extragalactic paper (from yesterday!) would land among the cosmology. Surely ‘Galaxy astrophysics’ would have been more obvious?
Anyway, nothing wrong with our bedfellows in today’s listing, so I’m not complaining.
Robert: yes, it’s particularly odd to have ‘galactic’ and ‘extragalactic’ and then put most (but not all) papers about galaxies, quasars and AGN in the former category. I take it this is just an error by whoever manually classified all the recent papers, rather than reflecting some very obscure policy that I can’t figure out before breakfast.
Sean,
Great idea. But “extragalactic” should definitely not be hyphenated. Not that I’m pedantic or anything.
Peter
I think scientists need other tools to deal with the proliferation of preprints each day and shouldn’t rely on the arxiv for everything.
Another way is to sort the preprints, based on a network of co-authorship i.e. based your list of the best authors and their co-authors. This is the approach implemented by Jean-Philippe Magué & Brice Ménard over at
http://www.arxivsorter.org/
I recommend it- it works.
Thank you, Sean and everyone else involved! Being one of those people who is trying to work at the interface of several arXiv categories, in addition to wanting to keep reasonably up to date on some related areas, I really appreciate this subdivision. I’m currently subscribed to several of the astro-ph subcategories, but I hope that when everyone is familiar with the system, I’ll be able to narrow it down a bit more when I see exactly where the interesting (to me) papers appear.
So it was you and Mark?!? Good for you!
We’re all very happy about this.
Didn’t they do a survey last year? I am sure this must have been repeatedly mentioned there as a suggestion for improvement. And an improvement it is indeed!
Hmm. Eat your vegetables.
That was fast: astro-ph.GA is now called Galaxy Astrophysics.
When I asked them about this a decade ago, they told me that “An african american will be president of the United States before we get around to subdividing astro-ph.”
Hmm — I guess I’m one of the curmudgeons who isn’t necessarily crazy about this idea. I’m perfectly fine with it as long as you can still get the full astro-ph listing every day, which apparently you can, so to each his/her own.
Why am I not instantly thrilled? I don’t think it’s just “change is scary!” but maybe I’m fooling myself. I do occasionally read papers in every one of these categories, not because I work in all of them but because the basic background required to read papers in most of them is similar — and interesting stuff is happening in all of them! And we talk about papers in all these topics in weekly discussions; it’s a lot less fun if each person has only read the papers that are directly relevant to what he/she is working on.
The other complaint you mention — that some work doesn’t fit neatly into one of these categories — is I think a real one, too. This setup isn’t transparently great for any basic physics development that is intended to apply equally well to many types of objects. (E.g., last week, I read a paper arguing for a common scaling law giving magnetic field strengths in generic astrophysical convection — so planets, stars, etc. Cross-listing is fine in this case, but seems a little like a patch — maybe it’d be better to have a “physics of astrophysics” type subcategory instead?)
None of these are deal breakers, of course, and it sounds like many other people were clamoring for the change. So enjoy! (Just don’t take away my full astro-ph mailing, please.)
I noted that in the current description at http://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph clusters of galaxies and galaxy evolution are listed both under astro-ph.CO – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics and astro-ph.GA – Galaxy Astrophysics. I wonder if that is intentional.
This has been under discussion for over ten years but somehow all it takes is a ten-minute discussion with Sean Carroll and it’s suddenly implemented?
I mean, I happen to mostly agree with Sean and like the change. But this has a significant effect on the research community, and it’s quite disturbing that after ten years of hemming and hawing that the whole thing seems to have been done on a whim, after consulting all of two people. Is this really how we want our research archives to be managed? I guess (for now) we don’t have much of a choice.
I guess speculative astrophysics, like what the universe would be like if had more dimensions or compact ones failed to unfurl just right, etc, would be in “CO”? How about the really speculative ones, like whether everything is just math and whether Bayesian selection deduction can help us about which range of possible worlds we’re in, etc? Some people like to write about that.
I’d have to agree with Sam, there must be a better way. Though these categories are useful additional meta-data.
http://arxivsorter.org/ is a start, though you have to seed it.
I’ve seen a version of digg for the arxiv, but nobody uses it.
I’d like to see something like http://www.feedhub.com/ for the arxiv, where it learns your preferences. Sadly that service trains on all the wrong characteristics to be useful.
Anybody else have helpful hints on ways to sort the arxiv, preferably adaptively, without filtering out content?
Yet one more example of the particle physics community imposing more specialization on the astrophysics community. They split the whole thing into six subjects rather than just tag the cosmology ones they are interested in. Extremely stupid.
This is devastating. 40 or 50 titles to skim every day is not too much to catch the ones slightly outside your field of study to find the ones that might actually be relevant to you. (The ongoing argument over the Solar oxygen abundance leaps to mind.) But people are lazy and willing to take the “easy” route at the cost of science.
And ditto to BG and Rob.
Seriously, people are being offered an option that they can choose to take advantage of, but are not being forced to, and they’re complaining about it?
I love the internet.