INSPIRE-HEP
The free index high-energy physics runs on — literature, authors, data, and jobs in one place.
At a Glance
- Publisher
- A collaboration of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, IHEP, and SLAC
- Coverage
1.5M+ records in high-energy physics with full-text links, citation analysis, author profiles, conferences, and experiment and dataset records (verify current counts).
- Access
Free and open; open API; community-maintained.
- Free alternative
- It is free; arXiv (hep) and NASA ADS overlap.
- Regional
Global; the shared infrastructure of the particle-physics community.
Our Take
INSPIRE-HEP is what a discipline builds when it runs its own index — maintained by the major particle-physics labs, it ties together the literature, author profiles, citation metrics, conference records, experiments, and even jobs in a way that reflects exactly how high-energy physics works. Its citation analysis and author disambiguation are trusted by the community for hiring and evaluation, and everything is free and openly available. The scope is deliberately narrow: this is HEP and its neighbours, not physics at large. Use it as the authoritative index within particle physics; step out to arXiv or ADS for adjacent fields.
Power Tips
- Use author profiles and citation summaries — the HEP community treats these as the standard record for evaluation.
- Follow the links from a paper to its associated experiments and datasets, not just its references.
- Query the open API for reproducible citation and co-authorship analysis.
Alternatives & Complements
arXiv, NASA ADS, Scopus, Google Scholar
Figures last verified: June 15, 2026