Start date:  24 Apr 2018; release date: 04 May 2018.

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/

Try the new search interface here: https://arxiv.org/search

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.