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
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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.
@Hiranya
I think the feed above is for Cosmo Coffee forum discussions, not “arXiv new filter”.
I seem to recall asking Anthony for a feed for the latter, but he said it was not available.
As you say RSS can be useful to keep track of which ones yo have read and which ones you have not.
In an ideal world, this -would- just be another option for how to filter through papers. But like it or not, the categories the arXiv chooses really do affect who reads what papers. Perception shapes reality and all that.
What I don’t understand is that I thought there -was- a panel formed to come up with categories, and they even had a proposal put forth… what happened to that? Why was it put aside in favor of the current implementation? Did Andrew Connolly (who’s supposed to represent astrophysics to the arXiv advisory board) have any input? Why is this all so opaque?
Like I said previously: I support the change. It’s not the “what” that makes me feel unsettled — it’s the “how”.
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Hi,
maybe gr-qc could be split up into gr-qc-ex (which focusses on experimental aspects
of gravity) and gr-qc-th which deals with everything else in gravity.
So extrasolar planets go where – “Earth and Planetary Astrophysics”? or “Galactic
Astrophysics”? I’m not strongly opposed, but I think the categories could have been defined differently.
OK, from the descriptions, extrasolar planets go in Earth&Planetary.
Not sure where planet formation goes – E&P includes “structure and formation of the solar system” , solar and stellar includes “star formation and protostellar systems”‘; cross-listings might take care of that but that seems spotty so far.
I’m deeply curious to find out what “stellar astrobiology” is.