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The Information Needs of High Energy Particle Physicists

Access to Information

July 2, 2003

Paige C. Lucas-Stannard

Introduction

            At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists thought they knew all they needed to about the fundamental building blocks of the Universe.  The blocks were called atoms, a word that means “indivisible” in Greek, and they were thought to be the basic units of which everything was made.  Then, in 1909, a physicist named Ernest Rutherford aimed a beam of alpha-particles at a sheet of gold foil and changed everything.  Rutherford’s results were so contrary to expected outcomes that it dispelled every theory about the structure of atoms.  A new era of research began on the quest for the nature of the Universe.  The leaders of this quest call themselves High Energy Particle Physicists.

            The considerable amount of research that has been done since Rutherford’s “gold foil” experiment has been substantial.  Each new particle creates a new line of research in order to discover the properties of the particle while other researchers continue searching for the next particle; hoping it will be “fundamental.”  As a result, vast quantities of information continue to grow exponentially.  Librarians are in a unique position to help create an infrastructure for the efficient and purposeful dissemination of this information.

            The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the main information channels that exist in High Energy Physics and how they can be utilized to best serve the population of researchers.  Characteristics of High Energy Physicists and their work environments will be explored as well as the existing channels of communication.  Finally, this paper will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each channel and the implications for information professionals.

            For the purposes of this discussion, High Energy Physicists will be defined as those scientists holding a doctoral degree in physics and working either in an accelerator laboratory or on the theoretical interpretation of data from an accelerator laboratory.  For means of comparison other fields of science will be discussed.  In this regard, physical scientists will be defined as including physicists but also chemists, mathematicians, and computer scientists.  Social sciences and biological sciences will be defined as any science in the medical, psychological, communicative, or other humanities fields.  Also, although High Energy Physics is a largely collaborative, international effort and many of the information sources are international in nature, the statistics and studies included here are limited to those scientists working in the United States.

 

What is High Energy Physics and Who are the High Energy Physicists?

            High Energy Physics, or HEP, is concerned with the myriad of fundamental particles that make up the Universe.  These particles are infinitesimally small and hard to detect.  In order to record information about these particles, physicists use larger particles and decrease their wavelength by accelerating them.  The accelerated particle slams into a material and recording devices collect data on the results.  Much like a microscope is used for looking at very small items, a particle accelerator is used for “seeing” particles that are at most 10-18 meters in diameter (Particle Adventure, 2003). 

HEP scientists have many roles to play in the research process.  Some focus on building better accelerators, others on interpreting the results, and still others on the theoretical aspects of particles and their interactions.  Fifty-three percent of physicists in general are involved in research, while 21% teach and 26% are involved in design and development (NSF, 2001).

            According to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Science Resources Statistics (2001), there are more than 44,000 physicists working in the United States. Of these, 81% are Caucasian. By comparison, chemistry is 79% Caucasian; mathematics, 78%; and computer sciences are 65% Caucasian.  Minority inclusion is limited in all of the sciences, however, physics fields are the least representative with a 16% Asian population and only .75% and 1.72% Black and Hispanic populations respectively.  The physics field is also predominately male; women represent only 5.8% of the physics population compared to 14% in the physical sciences overall.

            The ages of physicists conform to the trend for other physical sciences with a median age between 40-45 and a slight peak around 60 years of age (NSF, 2001).  Age does play a factor in the information seeking habits of physicists.  Bayer and Kilgour found age to be a factor in two facets of information behavior.  First, the dependency on online networks is inversely proportional to the age of the researcher, in other words, older physicists are less likely to rely on online resources than their younger colleagues.  Secondly, Bayer and Kilgour found that younger physicists had to look up and read more works that their older colleagues were familiar with from personal contact.  They state, “Most cited articles and their authors are old friends (1996).”

            It is also important to look at the environment in which physicists are doing their work.  According to the NSF survey, 39% of physicists work for private industry employers while 39% and 23% work for universities or government respectively. The number of HEP physicists that work for private industry may be lower than the average due to the highly theoretical (and less practical) application of the research.  This leaves a majority of the work in the public realm, which has an impact on access to information.  Ginsparg points out that the findings of publicly funded research should be “freely available as a public good (2003).”  Also, although research in HEP is expensive, there is not a large commercial application of research results, which differs from some of the medical research sciences where patents are necessary to secure the economic rights of a discovery (Hurd,  2000).

 

Why do High Energy Physicists Seek Information?

            Now that we have a snapshot of who HEP physicists are and the types of work they are doing it is valuable to look at some of the reasons they seek information and how they utilize it.  There are three categories into which HEP physicists’ information seeking may be divided: references, current awareness, and peer evaluation through citation analysis.

  The first category is adding references to papers that are being submitted for publication.  Physicists differ from researchers in other fields in the way they search for sources to cite and in how they use those citations.  Bayer and Kilgour (1996) explored the use of references in physics journals and found that citations were being used for seven main reasons: (1) To discuss a result of someone else’s research, (2) to suggest background readings, (3) to indicate others who may be doing similar research, (4) as support for theories, (5) to use someone else’s work for explanation, (6) to present an idea that is unprovable, and (7) to give credit for someone else’s ideas.  These reasons are similar to other fields’ use of citations.  Physicist, however, tend to conduct searches for information for citations at the end of their research and for the purpose of supporting their findings rather than before or during their research.  Physicists also rarely use direct quotations in their research publications, unlike social scientists that use direct quotations three-quarters of the time (Kilgour & Feder, 1992). 

            A second reason that HEP physicists     seek information is for staying abreast of current developments in the field.  It has been suggested that HEP physicists are compulsive communicators (O’Connell, 2002), which is evidenced in their leading the way with each new communications technology.  For example, Tim Berners-Lee, a HEP physicist at CERN (The European Center for Particle Physics) created the first web page in the world in 1990 and Paul Kunz, a HEP physicist at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) brought Berners-Lee’s idea to the United States, creating the World Wide Web (arXiv, 2003; CERN, 2003).

Why is communication so important in HEP research?  Goldschmidt-Clermont proposes that the reason lies in the rapid development and expense of research in HEP (1965).  One experiment can take months to set up and large capital investments to complete.  During that time it is important for HEP physicists to know what other work is being done that could parallel their work or render it of no value.  Collaboration has always been an important aspect of HEP research and it flourishes in a system with plentiful means of quick communication.  Other sciences, for example chemistry or the biological sciences, are less collaborative in part because they rely on patents and must thus keep their research secret (Hurd, 2000).

            The third reason that HEP physicists seek out and use information is for using citation analysis to determine the validity of a theory or the reputation of a researcher.  A great deal of emphasis is placed on the number of times a work is cited by others.  According to O’Connell, a work that is cited frequently lends validity to the findings and professional credence to the researcher (2002).  Furthermore, research has verified that citation access is one of the desired additions that physicists most want in a bibliographic record (Bayer & Kilgour, 1996).  Some of the tools that will be discussed in the next section are set up primarily to offer this information to researchers. 

 

What Information Channels Exist in High Energy Physics?

            There are three main channels of information communication that this paper will cover.  They are scholarly journals, pre-print or letters journals, and face-to-face communications, including conferences and symposiums.  These channels were discussed in 1965 by Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont who was the first librarian to look at the unique information infrastructure of HEP physicists (Vigen, 2002).  Her valuation has held true in the 38 years since she first proposed it in spite of the radical advances in communications technology.

 

Scholarly Journals

            Scholarly journals, here defined as those that are peer-reviewed, are the backbone of the science community.  They maintain a stable way for validation and review of theories.  Experiments can be replicated and evaluated by peers before being published.  Publication in a reputable journal also remains the primary means of gaining professional achievement.  Ginsparg points out that refereed publication constitutes a means of quality control as well as deciding job and grant allocations (2003) and Goldschmidt-Clermont states that “higher status is usually acknowledged for communication channels which convey more refined data, presented in a more elaborate form (1965).”  Journals are the most frequently used sources of references (Bayer & Kilgour, 1996).

           

Letters Journals and Pre-prints

Letters journals began as “letters to the editor” sections of journals and grew into their own publications (O’Connell, 2002).  These items are not peer-reviewed and generally are published much faster than regular journal articles.  This serves the need for quick communication that HEP physicists desire.  From letter journals emerged the pre-print. 

Pre-prints are “refeereable quality” works that are distributed as soon as they are written (Ginsparg, 2003).  “Refeereable” suggests papers of the quality to be subjected to peer-review and in most cases, pre-prints have been submitted in parallel for publication.  According to O’Connell, 70% of pre-prints are eventually published in journals (they are then called anti-prints) and another 20% are published in conference proceedings.  This is the ultimate answer to the need for speedy communication.  Pre-print service began by researchers sending copies of results via mail to colleagues at the time a manuscript was first sent to a publisher.  In 1962 SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) began archiving pre-prints.  These pre-prints were cataloged with basic bibliographic information (in a departure from traditional cataloging, SLAC included all authors in the bibliographic record which can be in the 100’s) and a weekly publication was sent to subscribers listing new pre-prints.  Eventually the collections of pre-prints were added to a computer database that interested physicists could query via email.  The current database at SLAC in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory and DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) is an online database that contains basic bibliographic information, all authors with links to their other works, up to 23 subject terms per paper, keyword searching, linked reference lists and citation information along with full-text links.  Physicists today can see the full-text version of a pre-print the same day it is submitted to the database, sometimes nine months before it is published in a journal (SPIRES, 2003; Ginsparg, 2003).  The result? Quick access to research information for free from any networked computer in the world.

 

Conferences and Symposiums

            The third major channel of information that exists in HEP is conferences and symposiums.  Goldschmidt-Clermont states that conferences are an important communication tool because they benefit from the “flexibility of oral communication (1965).” Conferences and symposiums create two types of equally important communications.  One is the verbal exchange that takes place in the informal “hallway lectures” at conferences.  These interactions serve to build new organizational collaborations, create symbiotic relationships between researchers, and to hear about new techniques being used months before even a pre-print would be available.  The second communication at conferences is the invited papers that are presented.  These are often cutting edge snapshots of the state of the field (Behrens, 1994).  Invited papers are usually included in conference proceedings that are published after the fact, sometimes a few months up to two years after the conference.  A conference then serves all three of the functions that physicists most often use information for:  references (from the eventual proceedings), current awareness, and gauging the importance of peers.

 

Information Sources: Advantages and Disadvantages

            We have seen the reasons that HEP physicists use information and some of the primary channels of information transfer that exist.  How can librarians use this information?  This section will look at each channel again, discuss its advantages and disadvantages and the role that information specialists play.

 

Scholarly Journals

The primary journals in HEP are: Nuclear Physics A, Physical Review C, Zeitschrift Fur Physik A, Soviet Journal of Physics, and the Journal of High Energy Physics (E-journal only) (Behrens, 1994).  Sixty-two to 65% of physicists prefer to read a print based journal and others only want an E-journal if it is printable (Brown, 1999; Heck, 2001).  Brown’s study also saw that 75% of physicists used the library’s copy as their access to journals and 81% photocopied the library’s copy for reading elsewhere.  Eighty-seven percent of physicists said they used current journals for their research and 40% used journals for teaching activities (this applies only to university physicists).  When asked where they find sources for less current information, 94% cited the references at the end of journal articles as their primary source .

The advantage then of the traditional journal is that it is still a preferred means of information retrieval both for staying current and in finding references.  Mangano discusses the “pleasure of skimming through a full volume of PRD [Physical Review D] while holding it in [your] hands.”  He also states that the advantage of print copy (as opposed to online versions of the same information) is that it is easy to reference a table or equation by continually flipping back and forth between pages.  “Several pages at once need to be under our eyes,” Mangano goes on to say, explaining the often non-linear reading of journal articles as opposed to monographs (Mangano, 2000).

The downside of print journals is their high cost, often prohibitively high for small libraries or independent researchers. Costs for libraries also include the amount of space needed to house a growing collection and the cost of processing journal subscriptions for use by patrons.  The other disadvantage of journals for researchers is the delay in publication due to the editorial and peer-review process, which can range from three to ten months (Goldschmidt-Clermont, 1965; Behrens, 1994).  The differences between print journals and electronic versions of the same material and their advantages/disadvantages to users and libraries are also important (for example,The Journal of High Energy Physics is entirely an online publication) but beyond the scope of this paper.    

 

Letters Journals and Pre-print Archives

            Access to research results prior to publication is achieved through letters journals and pre-print services.  The primary letters journals in HEP are: Physical Review Letters, Physical Letters B, JETP Letters, Modern Physics Letters A, and Europhysics Letters (Beherens, 1994).  Sometimes, letters journals are included in the category of scholarly journals, and rightly so, since they do carry the reputation of the publisher of refereed journals.  However, the original nature of the letter to the editor was for direct communication not hindered by the time restraints of peer-review.  The letters journal can be considered a stepping-stone between the journal format and the desire to view pre-printed material, which is why I have included it here.  The lines between journal and letters journal have blurred considerably, as evidenced by Brown’s study.  When asked to name the top five journals used by physicists, the top four titles given were letters journals (1999).  Even in 1965 letters journals were the “most popular journals in HEP (Goldschmidt-Clermont).”  Their primary advantage then is that they are popular and widely used.  Goldschmidt-Clermont points out that publication time is reduced to five or six weeks (1965), however, in 1994, Behrens states that the average time between submission and publication in a letters journal was two to five months, more closely approximating a regular journal.   Therefore its advantage is also its disadvantage in light of newer sources, such as the pre-print.

Pre-print services are handled through online servers such as arXiv (Cornell University’s pre-print archive), SPIRES, ADS (NASA’s Astronomical Data Service), and CERN Document Server.  In Brown’s study 19% of physicists listed Los Alamos National Laboratory Pre-print archive (now arXiv) as their method for keeping abreast of current developments in the field.  Another 6% listed SPIRES.  Sixty-seven percent of physicists in her study cited pre-print access as a primary tool to support research activities (1999).  The statistics show the popularity and importance of pre-print access.  In 2002 alone over 20 million full-text downloads occurred from the arXiv database which now has over 30 mirror sites around the world (Ginsparg, 2003). 

The primary advantage of pre-print archives, beyond their immediacy, is the amount of information available through the use of online hyperlinks.  This information is in great part a result of the collaboration of many different organizations.  As mentioned earlier, from its inception the SPIRES database indexed more terms (both subject and author) than most library catalogs.  DESY, which is now a collaborator on the SPIRES database, added the feature of keyword browsing.  ArXiv supplies the full-text of the document supplied directly by the author (note an additional advantage; because of a new text formatting language called TeX, the effort of adding a paper to a database is on the author and not the library or database staff).  Finally, and perhaps the most important feature of the pre-print archives is the information regarding references and citations.  Each paper has a list of references with links to that paper and a list of citations of each paper.  In SPIRES you may even search for articles based on how many times a paper is cited (50, 100, 500, etc.).  As previously mentioned this is very important to physicists who place a great deal of importance upon citation frequency.  Ginsparg points out that because the papers represent submissions to a myriad of journals, a subject search displays a breadth of coverage that any one journal could not match (2003).

The disadvantages of pre-prints are a hotly debated issue.  Particularly among other disciplines that are resistant to “pre-publication” access to results (Ginsparg, 1999).  This could be because of the patent and economic rights issues mentioned earlier.  Others worry about the decrease in publisher sales and the obsolescence of the print journal.  The numbers in Brown’s study seem to indicate that print journals are holding their own as an information channel.  Heck points out that electronic medium and traditional print “are not competing against each other, but rather complementing each other (2001).”  The American Physical Society, a publisher of some of the most used physics journals has endorsed the pre-print archive and is working towards cooperative arrangements between the archives and the print journals (Ginsparg, 1999).  Mangano’s review of print versus electronic access points out that the convenience of the services are random due to download times, e.g. slower at peak times of day (2000).  This highlights the truth that access to pre-prints is not universally viable for those with limited computer access or outdated servers that slow down the delivery.

 

Conferences and Symposiums

            Brown found that 75% of physicists depend on attendance at conferences as a way to keep abreast of current developments in their field.  As a comparison, 60% of chemists and biochemists relied on conferences.  The physicists polled relied on conference attendance more than any other source including reading journals and pre-prints (1999).  Furthermore, conferences account for about 30% of all physics publications (Behrens, 1994).

Some of the larger international conferences are:  International Conference on High Energy Physics, International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions at High Energies, International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, and International Symposium on Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions in Nuclei.  These conferences are sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), an organization of researachers in  more than 40 counties.  Proceedings form IUPAP conferences are always published post-conference.  There are also conferences for many of the national physical societies that are often called “spring meetings,” for example: Spring Meeting of the American Physical Society and the Spring Meeting of Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.  Publications for national conferences are more often limited to abstracts.  In addition to conferences there are symposiums on more specific topics and “schools,” which generally focus more on teaching and are invaluable for graduate students.  Schools and symposiums are more sporadic in their publications, if they publish at all (Behrens, 1994; Chillag, 1994).

Information generated from conferences fall into the category often known as “gray literature.”  This refers to information that is difficult to find, contains poor bibliographic information, or has non-professional layout (Chillag, 1994).  Other types of gray literature include technical reports and dissertations or theses.  The primary problem with conference proceedings is how does one know what information was covered and how can a copy be obtained.

Some of the larger conferences are predictable and stable in the publication of proceedings.  For example, the American Physical Society (APS) publishes conference proceedings three to five months after a conference and these are generally available for purchase by libraries directly from APS (Chillag, 1994).  Forty-seven percent of the physicists in Brown’s study cited conference proceedings as an important source of information (1999).  Another problem that remains is that conference proceedings are sometimes considered monographs and at other times serials.  In either case, finding an article without a complete bibliographic reference can be daunting (Chillag, 1994).

There are currently some services that are helping move the gray literature of conferences into the light.  First are indexes, such as the British Library Document Supply Center (BLDSC)’s Index of Conference Proceedings, which is published monthly and compiled yearly.  In the United States there is the Office of Science and Technology Information Center (OSTI), a part of the Department of Energy.  OSTI operates an online searchable database of conference proceedings where each conference is given a unique CONF number to identify it, this allows papers that are submitted to the database at different times to be identified easily.  The SPIRES database and ADS, mentioned in the previous section, also include a limited but searchable database of conference proceedings.  Behrens points out that conference information dissemination is still imperfect, “how can one gain access to a brief note pinned to a notice board at what one refers to as a “poster session” of a conference? …situations [such as this] are where grey literature becomes black (1994).”

 

Conclusion

            HEP physicists primarily search for information for references, current awareness, and peer evaluation through citation analysis.  Factors that may affect their information seeking are the roles played in the research arena (experimental or theoretical), the work environment, and personal factors such as age or electronic preferences. There are channels of information in place in HEP that serve different but overlapping purposes, these are scholarly journals, letters journals and pre-prints, and conferences and symposiums.

            Information exchange in HEP is complex and varied.  Any one means of communication does not stand out as primary; instead they work together to create a web of information that aids researchers in their work.  Scholarly journals are used for current awareness, referencing, and peer evaluation; letters journals and pre-prints are used for current awareness; and conferences are also used as current awareness as well as their proceedings playing an important role in peer evaluation and referencing.  A thorough understanding of these channels can help librarians better serve a community of researcher and thus advance the search for the fundamental building blocks of the Universe.

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