Anthony

One of the things mentioned in Sarah Bridle's talk at YAM last week was a filter for arXiv.org provided by CosmoCoffee. I decided to sample it this week.

After creating an account on CosmoCoffee, you will need to edit the keywords in your profile to reflect your interests (well, I did!). Then click on Arxiv new filter and you're off!

Here are my settings:

• Arxives in order of interest: astro-ph
• Arxiv New search key strings: galaxy (redshift )?survey, luminosity (function|density), surface brightness, UKIDSS, UKIRT, VISTA, SDSS, Sloan, WFCAM, near infrared, stellar mass, star formation (rate|history), galax, Bayes, redshift, astro-ph, ADS, extragalactic

And here are the results:

• Monday: 54 new on astro-ph, of which 21 made it through the filter. These were not only filtered but also sorted by CosmoCoffee so the most relevant were listed first. Very useful.
• Tuesday: 76 on astro-ph; 27 on CosmoCoffee. It missed The Future of Cosmology by George Efstathiou, which was a fun read. But I can't think of any way to adjust the CosmoCoffee filter to catch papers like this, without catching loads of other cosmology papers. But in the full astro-ph listings I skimmed over the paper on globular clusters and their host galaxies, which was ranked highly by CosmoCoffee.
• Wednesday: 42 on astro-ph; 14 on CosmoCoffee, filtered and sorted just right.
• Thursday: 52 on astro-ph; 22 on CosmoCoffee. Hmm, wish I knew more about dwarf galaxies.
• Friday: 30 on astro-ph; 7 on CosmoCoffee (must be getting near Christmas). Glad I skimmed through astro-ph, as my filter settings excluded this fascinating article on the history of dark energy. Apparently Newton thought of it (or something like it) 320 years ago!

Conclusion: based on this week's experience, I'm likely to miss interesting and relevant papers if I use either astro-ph or CosmoCoffee ... so I'll use both! Start each day adagio on CosmoCoffee, accelerando poco a poco, then prestissimo through astro-ph.