Musings

does this mean the category names like hep-th and gr-qc are a thing of the past?

Doesn’t this affect searching etc, like I am looking for a paper but I am not sure if it came out before or after the renaming. So I have to search twice, once hep-th and once physics.HT? Or is this going to be implemented retroactively so all papers of the past are reassigned to the new categories? What happens to everybody’s homepages, cv’s etc, do they have to be updated?

In principle, adjusting categories to the need sounds a like a good idea but what about all these transition problems?

Robert
being in conservative mood today.

I think it’s a great idea to reorganize some of the categories, in particular those that have been less accepted than hep-th. I remember vividly how a condensed matter colleague of mine said, “I used to post all my papers on cond-mat, but I’ve kind of stopped doing that”. I don’t know what the reason is – maybe string theorists are just smarter than other physicists? ;) –, but the same would *never* happen to hep-th.

That said, I’m kind of sad that they also want to change hep-th, because there is absolutely no reason for that! Never change a running system…

Michael

The naming strikes me as a bit odd. You seem to have settled for 10-letter names, but then you use almost all of the available code space to denote math vs. physics (rather general information). All of the interesting information is crammed into the last two letters. And, lets face it, the two lettter codes are not self-explanatory. If space were at a premium, why not use pGR insted of physics.GR?

What is wrong with a usenet-like hierachical and human readable naming scheme, like

physics.astro.cosmology
physics.astro.galaxies
physics.astro.starts
physics.astro.planets

If chosen carefully, one could then uniquely abbreviate them as p.a.c, p.a.g, p.a.s, p.a.p.

The supercategories are good, but even better would be a dynamically generated homepage with the archives of your choice.

Actually the main function of the supercategories is not to cater to the unwilling or the unable. The arXiv has never had much loyalty to that group; although things will hopefully get much better, it will remain a secondary concern.

The real point of the supercategories is to reassure authors that readers will use those supercategories. It would be disruptive, and otherwise a source of FUD, if authors had to guess all of the supercategories that readers cobbled together. As Jacques siad, readers will still be able to do that, but it is expected to be a side issue. Predefined supercategories are part of the strong coupling between authors and readers that sustains the arXiv.

This model is supported by experimental data, in that users expressed fear that cond-mat and astro-ph might “go away”.

The category choices look sensible to me, but I’m nonplussed by the naming convention, for two reasons (partially echoing Volker’s and Jacques’s comments above):

1) The new two-character names are harder to understand than the old ones – is there some technical constraint preventing the use of longer names?

2) If I am looking at a category name there is no semantic clue that tells me whether it is a supercategory or not. This feels wrong, since the two types of category obey different rules, e.g. one can post papers to physics.AC but not to physics.AA.

Subscribing to a supercategory to read a range of preprints seems like a good idea, but what is the rationale for the groupings? Isn’t there more overlap between say gr-qc and hep-th than hep-th and physics.id? gr-qc certainly cross-lists to hep-th quite a bit at the moment.

Frankly I don’t think that it is a terribly good idea. It will create chaos, maybe even invalidate web links that point to the articles (which would be really bad), and so forth. Do you really want to change these things retroactively?

If yes, how will you sort all the articles? If not, will the two conventions co-exist? Strange in any case.

A part of my negative attitude may be just because the new names look so ugly (and even those for which the dot-abbreviation format has been used still look ugly to me). Why don’t you follow the standard arXiv hep-th-like conventions?

That would mean something like:

astro-cosm, astro-galax, astro-star, astro-planet, hep-model, hep-qcd, phys-cm, phys-as, phys-he, phys-np

You may also subdivide hep-th to hep-st (string theory) and hep-ns (no strings).

Also, when you already changing the formats, I would propose to introduce a unified number identification of every new preprint from any arxiv, such as 0510140. Because there are more than 1000 papers monthly, they would continue like 0509A00 after 0509999. Is not 3600 papers a month enough? If not, there are obvious ways how to extend the sequence using two letters, such as 0509AA0, and so forth. It could simplify life if preprints could be parameterized by seven characters only. Of course, the hep-qcd things could be added, but not as a necessary condition.

I would strongly urge that the existing names be kept and new ones added in the same style. hep-th, hep-ph. gr-qc are all embedded in our mental habits and they feel good. Why change them? Yes, they could be more uniform, but the new names physic.ab are very untransparent and feel more like something librarians would invent than physicists. The original names arose at a moment when the archive was new and less formal and are hence more reflective of the style and culture of physicists. There is also value in keeping names for things which we have become familar and happy with.

On a more substantial note, there has been for some time an ambituity as to whether non-string quantum gravity papers go to hep-th or gr-qc. Most that are not explicitly quantum cosmology go to hep-th and this is a good thing as it means papers on all the diffferent approaches to quantum gravity are in the same place. This matters because the alternative is that people who work on different approaches to the same problem become ignorant about what the others are doing.

I would thus propose to formalize this and move quantum gravity generally to
physics.HT, labeling it
High-Energy – Field Theory, String Theory and Quantum Gravity

Thanks,

Lee

Didn’t the ArXiv people try to enforce a similar change around 1997? Everything should go to the physics archive, with different subject classes; hep-th and perhaps gr-qc were kept for backward compatibility only. Evidently people didn’t like this order, because the policy changed in 1998. In particular, all posts to physics, Subj. class Mathematical physics were automatically cross-posted to math-ph.