
Do ArXiv papers get deleted after a particular period? - godelmachine
Hi everyone,<p>This question has been bugging me since long. I am not able to access papers on arxiv that are more than 7 days old.<p>For ex, today is Feb 6th. The oldest paper I can see is from Jan 30th. Not before that.<p>And I see this happening for almost 3 years now.<p>Do they delete their papers periodically?<p>Am I doing something wrong here?<p>Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.<p>Thanks in advance for any help you could provide.<p>Memento Mori :)
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T-A
Are you looking at the list of recent papers? That would explain it.

Here are the hep-th entries from August 1991, which was... a while ago:

[https://arxiv.org/list?year=91&month=08&archive=hep-
th&submi...](https://arxiv.org/list?year=91&month=08&archive=hep-th&submit=Go)

Here is the list of recent submissions to hep-th:

[https://arxiv.org/list/hep-th/recent](https://arxiv.org/list/hep-th/recent)

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godelmachine
Hi, thanks for replying.

May I ask how did you pull out August 1991 entries?

Did you run a query or something on their search bar?

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T-A
Go to the front page,

[https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/)

and click the topic you want, for instance "High Energy Physics - Theory":

[https://arxiv.org/archive/hep-th](https://arxiv.org/archive/hep-th)

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godelmachine
Thanks for your quick response.

I am interested in Hardware Architecture in Computer Science. So I clicked on
that. This is the URL I get -
[https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AR/recent](https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AR/recent)

After that, did you modify the URL manually to include "archive/cs.AR" or did
you click somewhere else on the website?

Merci beaucoup.

~~~
T-A
Oh, I see what they did, they broke up CS into a bunch of subject classes and
did not include separate archive links for those.

This (hand-made) URL gives you the humongous archive for all subject classes:

[https://arxiv.org/archive/cs.AR/](https://arxiv.org/archive/cs.AR/)

~~~
godelmachine
I am still missing something.

Even if I use the URL above which you were kind enought o provide - and I go
to the browse section and enter, say, - "September 2013", the results don't
appear from Hardware Architecture. They appear from all subsections. Few
entries don't even have Hardware Architecture tag on them.

~~~
T-A
Yes, that's why I pointed out that my hand-made URL gives you papers from all
subject classes.

I guess what's happened is this: originally they just had CS, then the number
of submissions swelled and became impractically large, so they broke it up
into subject classes... but they did not go back and sort all old submissions
according to the newly introduced subject classes, because it would be way too
much work.

Maybe they will let somebody train a classifier on new submissions and let it
go back over the old entries, someday. But until they do, the archive is an
unsorted mess of all subject classes.

And that's why they don't provide an archive link for each subject class.

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godelmachine
Thanks a ton for your help and explaination so far !!

