Long Author Lists in HEP

Experimental collaborations often exceed 500 authors, and these lists of authors are increasingly difficult for SPIRES to track. While it is true that the authors are generally listed on the paper, the exact formatting is different between collaborations, and sometimes even between papers. This means that significant manual effort must be put in to correctly parse the author and affiliation lists of large collaborations.

Why should I care?

If you are an experimental author, you may wonder why your paper displays Long Author List - Awaiting processing, or you may wonder why the collaboration's recent paper doesn't appear when searching your name. Both of these are due to the large queue of experimental author lists that we have to parse, sometimes almost completely by hand using basic cut and paste tools.

What can I do?

We hope to develop a standard XML format for exchanging this information about authorship, however, for the moment we try to parse both LaTeX and pdf files to extract author and affiliation information. What your collaboration can do is to make sure that your author list is easily parsed by SPIRES. While your experiment is no doubt consistent with these lists, there is very little consistency between experiments, leading to a lot of work for us, and a long time before your paper displays.

So what should our author list look like?

• It should be in a file called author*.tex (i.e. the name must start with author and end with .tex) or it can be embedded in the paper itself.
• If it is embedded within the paper it should either be followed by
  • \begin{abstract}
  • \section{
  • \end{titlepage}
  or it can be at the very end of the paper.
• Authors should be denoted by \author{A.B.C. Jones} (Note we currently have no good way to handle double last names without hyphens...)
• Affiliations can be denoted as \affiliation{University of Quantum}

Do good papers get fast-tracked

At the moment we are parsing lists roughly in the order received, so several difficult lists may slow up the process for all. We may change this policy in the future to reward collaborations that use easily parsed, standard author lists.

We'll keep this page up to date with better instructions as we refine the processing, and feel free to suggest things at spires@slac.stanford.edu