Start date: ; release date: .
Source code: https://github.com/cul-it/arxiv-search/releases/tag/0.2
Improvements to author search and fixes to bugs from release 0.1. For additional details, see this blog post: https://blogs.cornell.edu/arxiv/2018/05/04/release-search-v0-2-some-notes-on-names/
Features & Improvements
Searching by author name:
There is some confusion between how the classic author search works compared to the new author search, so we updated the documentation to clarify the differences.
Users expected to see better results when searching for multiple (co-)authors, and when searching by title/abstract terms and author names in "all fields". We have made significant improvements to cross-field searches.
- Users had difficulty retrieving results for a specific author or set of authors, and avoiding spurious and unrelated results. We have simplified and improved the logic applied to author name searches to provide a narrower set of results and more predictable behavior overall.
Reintroduced (experimental) full-text search: users were disappointed to see the classic experimental full-text search disappear, so we have reintroduced that option. The experimental full text search is not operated by the arXiv team, but we do plan to introduce in-house full text search later this year.
- Tweaks to user interface:
- Some users found the small and light abstract text too hard to read; we have increased the font size and darkened the type.
- Some mobile users were having trouble interacting with the advanced search form. We've made some adjustments to address those issues.
Bugs
- Author search fixes:
- Fixed a problem that was causing trouble when searching for names that contain hyphens.
- Fixed a problem that was causing unexpected results when searching by author name using initials.
- Fixed a problem that was generating too many false positives in searches by author name.
- Errors in handling certain characters: fixed a bug that was causing errors when certain characters were entered.
- Miscellaneous:
- Fixed an inconsistency in how we link to the abstract page and paper PDF in the search results.
- Fixed a bug that prevented searching for papers that have classifications in categories that are no longer canonical.
- Fixed a bug that caused a small set of papers to be missing from search results.