SPIRES Search Guide

5 Online Databases are maintained at the DESY Server under the database system SPIRES.

HEP or PREPRINTS is a bibliographic database of journal articles, monographs, preprints, conference papers, theses, etc. on high energy physics and neighboring fields like quantum gravity. It is jointly produced by the SLAC library and the DESY Documentation Group. The DESY documentation is responsible for providing access to the contents of the database. Each paper or monograph is indexed with a number of keywords (see Keyword List and User's Guide) which concentrate its physical contents.
CONF(Conferences in High Energy Physics and related topics) is supplied and maintained by the SLAC Library (also input by DESY).
BOOKS is the DESY library's Online Public Access Catalog and is therefore of interest not only for particle physicists.
ABSTRACT is a bibliographic database with abstracts of the electronic preprints which are stored at the SLAC or DESY Servers.
INSTITUTIONS is a database of all affiliations or institutions of the HEP Database.

The SPIRES database system uses english commands.
The entries in the databases are also in english, except of the BOOKS database, which contains bibliographic data in the monographs original languages (if latin script).

In the following description, possible abbreviations of commands or index fields will be written in capital letters. Most SPIRES commands can be abbreviated to the first 3 characters, e.g. SELect, FINd.

Begin a Session

To enter the SPIRES system on the DESY Unix Cluster, type

SPIRES

You get the response

Loading module: spires
Loading completed:  848896 bytes.
-Welcome to SPIRES 94.01

Select a database

To select one of the 5 databases (database = subfile in SPIRES terminology), enter the command

-> SELect database_name

e.g.

SEL HEP, SEL CONF, SEL BOOKS

The command

-> SHOw SELect

shows the name of the subfile currently selected.

Execute a Search

SHOW INDEX

The searching of the databases is organized by indexed fields, like title, author, keyword, etc.

-> SHOw INDEX

shows a list of all searchable index fields of the current database.

BROWSE

For a successfull search via an index field, it is neccessary to know what the values of an index field look like.

-> BROwse index_field

e.g.

-> BRO Author

produces a random selection of values (author names) in the selected field.
If you want to find out whether a value you are interested in is valid or if you want to see nearby values, type

-> BROwse index_field value

E.g. you can find out the spelling of the author Abramovsky with

-> BRO Author abramovsky .

-> BROwse FIRST index_field

lists the contents of an index field from the beginning;

-> BROwse LAST index_field

lists the contents backwards from the end.

After displaying some index values the system will ask:

-More?

To continue, type: Y
To stop, type: N or press the Enter key.
To change the direction from forward to backward browsing, type: B

FIND

To execute a search use the command

-> FINd index_field value

Examples:

                                                          
-> FIN Place hamburg 

-> FIN Author hawking 
 
-> FIN Keyword pomeron 
   
-> FIN Title light cone

You will be told the number of matching records.

SOME HINTS FOR SEARCHING WITH "FIND"

If you want to decrease or increase the amount of retrieved information, you can use the Boolean operators "AND", "OR", "NOT" after executing a search or in one search command.
Examples:

-> FIN Author hawking
-Result: 108 DOCUMENTS             
-> AND Title time                                                          
-Result: 5 DOCUMENTS

                       
-> FIN Title supersymmetry OR Keyword supersymmetry AND Date jan 1995
-Result: 6 DOCUMENTS

If you want to do this within the same index field, it is not necessary to repeat the index field name, e.g.

-> FIN Keyword Higgs model
-Result: 939 DOCUMENTS                                                     
-> OR Higgs particle                                                  
-Result: 6559 DOCUMENTS                  
-> FIN Keyword Higgs particle AND NOT book    
-Result: 5639 DOCUMENTS

The command

-> FIN Author smith AND jones OR brown

is processed as

-> FIN Author (smith AND jones) OR brown

The command

-> FIN Author brown OR smith AND jones

is processed as

-> FIN Author (brown OR smith) AND jones

If you want to change the processing order use parentheses.

To redisplay all find commands of the current search, use

-> SHOw SEARCH

e.g.

-> FIN Author jackson
-> AND Author scharre                                                      
-> SHOw SEARCH                                                         
    fin a jackson                                                  
    and a scharre

Some of the index fields are "qualifiers", like the date-field in the HEP database. Qualifiers can only be used to narrow a result, e.g. the command
```
-> FIN Date 1992 
```
is not valid!
In the title of books, papers and conferences or in abstracts words can be variable in spelling (e.g. quantum chromodynamics and QCD, pbar and anti-p, etc.). Try
```
-> BROwse index_field value 
```
and\or use the right-truncation #:
```
-> FIN Title supersymmetr# 
```
matches all documents with words like supersymmetry, supersymmetric, etc. in the title.
If you want to achieve a complete retrieval, it is recommended to execute a search in the keyword field with the help of Keyword list and User's guide (due to the uncertainties of words used by the author in the title).
The command
```
-> FIN Title Regge# pole# 
```
finds all documents with title words beginning with "regge" and "pole" anywhere in the title in any order.
In the HEP database the report number and collaboration index fields support wild card searching. For example:
```
-> FIN Report-num DESY#92-03 
```
will find reports like DESY-F35-92-03, DESY-HERA-92-03, etc. The # stands for any characters.
In the BROwse command the character # is has no special meaning.
Some indexes do not support truncated searching. Instead of the truncation you can use the "Prefix" search:
```
-> FIN Author PRE feyn 
```
has the same result as
```
-> FIN Author feyn# 
```
There are even more operators for the FIND command, like "with", "string", etc. For more informations, try
```
-> EXP WITH
```
or
```
-> EXP STRING
```
Note : Since 1996 the search by "prefix", "suffix", etc. is no longer supported for the TITLE index.
Any search value containing any of the special characters ( ) < > = must be enclosed in quotes, e.g.
```
-> FIN Keyword "SU(3)"
```
You cannot search for words like "a", "the", etc. in the title or abstract.
The find command is case insensitive (like all other commands).

The BACKUP command takes you one step back during one search, e.g.

-> FIN Author hawking 
-Result: 108 DOCUMENTS                                               
-> AND Title time                                                          
-Result: 5 DOCUMENTS                                                 
-> BACKUP                                                                  
-Result: 108 documents

In numerical fields and the date field you can search with "after", "before", < , > , e.g.

-> AND Date AFTER Dec 1993                                            
 -> AND Date > 1985 

 -> FIN Date-Added > -7 (implicit "today"; looks for the new books of the 
                        current week in the BOOKS database)

Display the results

To list the retrieved information use the TYPE command.

FORMATS

The format in which the data are listed is the default format (which is called "public" or "default"). For other output formats type

-> SHOw FORmats

in the current database.
To change the format, type

-> SET FORmat format_name

e.g.

-> SET FOR brief

To see a complete unformatted record use:

-> CLEAR FORMAT                                                        
-> TYPE

You can select certain elements to be displayed in all of the databases. For example, the command

-> TYPE Title Author Desy-Keywords

displays title, authors and keywords of your results in the HEP database. The name of the elements used for the TYPE command are not always the same names as the index fields used for the FIND command. So you search for keywords with "FINd Keyword ...", but you display them with "TYPE Desy-Keywords". You can take a look at the elements with

-> SHOw ELEments

TYPE

The command

-> TYPE PAUSE

will list the records one after the other. With "Ctrl C" you can stop the listing.

-> TYPE KEEP

allows rejection of unwanted items; for each record you can decide with YES or NO, whether you want to keep it.

If you already know the first part of your results and want to start listing at a point beyond the beginning, type

-> TYPE SKIP n

with n the number of items to skip over.

SORTING

If you want to change the order of your search results you can sort them with the SEQ command, e.g.

-> FIN Title Z0 AND Date 1992
-> SEQ Author Title

sorts the results alphabetically by first author and by title. The name of the elements used for the SEQ command are not always the same names as the index fields. To make sure type

-> SHOw ELEments

The results of a search in the HEP database are sorted in reverse chronological order (as they have been entered into the database). To obtain a true reverse chronological order, type

-> SEQ DS (D)

which sorts the records in descending order by the virtual field "Data Sort" (ds). It contains the document date (if available) or "date received".

Store and print the results

STORE

To store the retrieved information, there are several possibilities.

You can use the STORE command, e.g.
```
-> FIN Title Z0 AND Date 1992
-> STORE RESULT name 
```
"name" should be your mnemonic for this search result, because it is saved as "result.name". To get back a stored result in one of your next sessions:
```
-> FIN @result name 
```
Another command for creating files is the OUTPUT command:
```
-> OUTput CLeaN CLeaR 
```
writes your results in the File "Active.File" (if you prefer another file name, type "use file name" before the OUTPUT command) To append results of the current search to a previous search, type
```
-> OUTput CLeaN CONTinue 
```

It's possible to write the results of SPIRES commands in the File "Active.File" with

-> IN ACTive CONTinue SPIRES_command

e.g.

-> IN ACT CONT SHOW INDEX 
 
-> IN ACT CONT BRO Title supersym 

-> IN ACT CONT TYPE

PRINT

The files Active.File and Result.name can be printed with the Unix "lpr" command on Unix level.

To get printed results with no page breaks in the middle of references, with centering and page numbers use:

-> SET REPORT                                                          
-> OUT CLN CLR

You can select certain elements to be printed with e.g.

-> SET FORmat $report Title,Author,Desy-keywords

Helps

For help in the SPIRES system use

-> EXPlain database_name 
  
-> EXPlain command

e.g.

-> EXP hep 
  
-> EXP books 
                                                          
-> EXP find 
                                                           
-> EXP everything

Leaving SPIRES

SPIRES is terminated by the command

-> EXIT

April 1995, Sabine Pfaff