omnischolar/inspire

INSPIRE-HEP, the high-energy physics database, for omnisense/omnischolar: an author's profile - by INSPIRE record, BAI or ORCID - with their positions and INSPIRE's citation summary; their literature with citation counts, arXiv ids, DOIs and journal references; a paper by its INSPIRE record, DOI or arXiv id; a search in INSPIRE's own query language. The source calls INSPIRE's REST API, without a key:

The base address is InspireSource::BASE_URI (https://inspirehep.net/api/). There is no sandbox.

Installation

composer require omnischolar/inspire

Requires PHP 8.2, omnisense/omnischolar (1.x) and symfony/http-client (6.4, 7 or 8). In a Symfony application with OmnischolarBundle, the factory is registered as soon as the package is installed.

Credentials

None. INSPIRE allows 15 calls in 5 seconds: the default throttle leaves 0.35 s between two.

Options

Capabilities

capabilities(): author, works, work, search, metrics, citations, abstracts, affiliations, domains.

Behaviour

Query. domains → (arxiv_eprints.categories:hep-th or ...); from/to → de <from>-><to> (1000 and 9999 for an open end); types → document_type:"..." with INSPIRE's types for each kind (article; book, proceedings; book chapter; conference paper; article for preprints too; thesis; report, activity report; note for other) - a kind INSPIRE has none for gives an empty page without a call; openAccess is not read. sort: newest → mostrecent, oldest → leastrecent, cited → mostcited, relevance → bestmatch. size = limit 1 to 1000; the cursor is a page number (from 1), the next one given while INSPIRE links a next page; Page::$total is INSPIRE's.

Works by ORCID or record. The author's record is read first and its BAI taken: no BAI, an empty page.

An author. The preferred name, given and family names (from the name), name variants and native names, the INSPIRE record, BAI and ORCID; positions as Affiliations (education for the PHD, MASTER and UNDERGRADUATE ranks, employment otherwise; the rank as role; start, end, current as INSPIRE says); INSPIRE's citation summary as Metrics (citeable papers, citations, h-index) when the author has a BAI; the INSPIRE page and the record's URLs; the arXiv categories as keywords.

A paper. Title and subtitle; type (an article without a journal nor a DOI is a preprint; the others as their document type); authors with their BAI, ORCID and affiliations, editors by their role; year (the journal's, else the earliest date) and date; venue (the journal - the publication before a reprint or an erratum - or arXiv for a preprint); publisher (the imprint); volume, issue, pages (or the article id); abstract; language; openAccess and the arXiv PDF when there is an arXiv id; the INSPIRE page; citation count; keywords; the arXiv categories as domains; identifiers: INSPIRE record, DOIs (the publication's first), arXiv id, ISBNs. Collaboration papers carry thousands of authors: all are read.

Example

<?php

require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';

use Omnischolar\Inspire\InspireSourceFactory;
use Omnischolar\Source\Query;
use Symfony\Component\HttpClient\HttpClient;

$inspire = (new InspireSourceFactory(HttpClient::create()))->create(['mailto' => getenv('OMNISCHOLAR_MAILTO') ?: null]);

$a = $inspire->author('bai:Juan.M.Maldacena.1');
echo $a->name, ': ', $a->metrics?->works, ' citeable papers, ', $a->metrics?->citations, ' citations, h-index ', $a->metrics?->hIndex, "\n";
foreach (array_slice($a->affiliations, 0, 2) as $f) {
    echo '  ', $f->organization, ' ', $f->role, ' ', $f->start, $f->isCurrent() ? ' (current)' : '', "\n";
}
foreach ($inspire->works('bai:Juan.M.Maldacena.1', new Query(sort: Query::CITED, limit: 3)) as $work) {
    printf("  %s  %-10s %s - %s cited %d\n", $work->date ?? $work->year, $work->type->value, mb_substr($work->fullTitle(), 0, 80), $work->venue?->name, $work->citations);
}

Juan M. Maldacena: 197 citeable papers, 97450 citations, h-index 118
  Princeton, Inst. Advanced Study Senior 2001 (current)
  Harvard U. Senior 1997
  1998  article    The Large $N$ limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity - Adv.Theor.Math.Phys. cited 22731
  2000  article    Large N field theories, string theory and gravity - Phys.Rept. cited 6340
  2003  article    Non-Gaussian features of primordial fluctuations in single field inflationary mo - JHEP cited 3355

(called live on 2026-10-26 at 14:18 UTC, from the core's harness image, without a mailto)

In Symfony:

omnischolar:
    sources:
        inspire: { factory: inspire, options: { mailto: '%env(OMNISCHOLAR_MAILTO)%' } }

Errors

Verified, and not

Tested offline: Tests/InspireSourceTest.php (5 tests), on MockHttpClient with answers recorded on 2026-10-04 (Juan Maldacena): the author by BAI and by ORCID, the citation summary, two pages of literature, hep-th/9711200 by arXiv id. Called live on 2026-10-04 and on 2026-10-26 (the example above).

Limits of the service: physics only (high-energy and neighbouring fields); literature by ORCID goes through the author's BAI (searching the ORCID on papers finds fewer).

Responsibility

An independent, unofficial client, not affiliated with INSPIRE or its partner laboratories. Whoever runs it complies with INSPIRE's terms (INSPIRE terms of use): see the README's Responsibility section.