Basics of OpenArXiv
User Interface

Basics of OpenArXiv

OpenArXiv is a niche search engine built off of an XML web service designed to retrieve results from the website arxiv.org. To perform a search for a certain publication or person, simply select the relevant link above the search box, type in the search query, and press "ArXiv Search".

Searching with OpenArXiv
OpenArXiv performs its searches using Microsoft full-text indexing. It does NOT support boolean search syntax; instead, it simply searches for results that most closely match the search string.


Choosing Names
Because of irregularities in the way author names are stored by arxiv.org (and subsequently retrieved for use by OpenArXiv), there are many instances of almost identical names that in fact refer to the same person. Person searches are limited to the first 50 results returned, as there's a very high probability that the name being searched for will appear in that set of results. In order to increase chances of an accurate result, a more complete name is preferable.

Searching for just a last name will likely cause problems as full-text searches use alphabetical order as a tiebreaker for equally relevant results, so a search for simply "Davis" with the intent of finding "Matthew J. Davis" will fail. In addition, the search will not consider an isolated character as part of a search string, so "J. Davis" will return the same results as "Davis". When searching for a person, provide the most complete name possible.


Capitalization
OpenArXiv is NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case, although on the results page, OpenArXiv will reproduce the search string using the case it was entered as, although this has no effect on the results. "Davis" and "DaViS" are identical as far as search results are concerned.

Wild Card Searches
OpenArXiv does NOT explicity support wild card searches. A search for "Gauss* Generating" will be treated the same as "Gauss Generating". However, full-text indexing recognizes similar but nonidentical results when the most identical results have been exhausted. For example, a search for "Gaussian Generating" reveals only a handful of publications whose titles contain both "Gaussian" and "Generating". One of the other results on the first page contains neither word, but it does contain both "generate" and "generated".

User Interface

Following is a presentation of the different pages you will find while browsing OpenArXiv.
 

OpenArXiv Main page. The home page of OpenArXiv. This page provides a search bar, a submit button, and the option to switch the search between "Publications" and "Persons". In addition, located beneath the search bar is a listing of categories. The bolded links represent indvidual archives into which papers are submitted, while the non-bolded links that follow them allow for browsing of all documents that pertain to that subject, regardless of the archive these documents were submitted into. The search bar is available on the top of every page for ease of use.

Publications Search Result page. This page displays 20 results returned by the full text query of the publications table, with order descending by relevance. The publication's relevance ranking, arXiv ID, title, author(s), and comments are all displayed, as well as links for viewing publications cited by the result and for viewing similar publications. Viewing similar publications simply performs a new publications search with the original publication's title as the search query.

If applicable, the journal reference of the publication and any relevant topics it belongs to are displayed. Topics are divided up into subj-class (general natural-language topic, used by any publication), acm-class (alphanumeric classification system for computer science topics), and msc-class (alphanumeric classification system for mathimatical topics). Results can be paged through if more than 20 have been found. This page's same format is retained for the View Similar Publications, Works Cited, View Publications by Author, and View Publications by Archive/Topic pages.

Persons Search Result page. This page displays the top 50 results returned by the full text query of the persons table, with order descending by relevance. The persons's relevance ranking and name are displayed, with the name being a hyperlink to a listing of all publications that person has authored.