CiteSeerX

CiteSeerX

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Type	Digital library, Search engine

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science. It was originally developed at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and is now hosted at Pennsylvania State University.

History

CiteSeerX was initially created in 1998 by Steve Lawrence, Lee Giles, and Kurt Bollacker as a tool to improve the dissemination and accessibility of scientific literature. The project was inspired by the need for a more efficient way to search for and access academic papers, particularly in the rapidly growing field of computer science.

The original CiteSeer was one of the first automated citation indexing systems, and it introduced several innovations in the field of academic search engines, including autonomous citation indexing, which automatically extracts citations from academic papers and links them to the cited documents.

In 2008, CiteSeer was replaced by CiteSeerX, which was developed to address scalability issues and to provide a more robust and feature-rich platform. CiteSeerX is built on open-source software and is designed to be more extensible and easier to maintain.

Features

CiteSeerX offers several features that make it a valuable resource for researchers and students:

• Autonomous Citation Indexing: CiteSeerX automatically extracts and indexes citations from academic papers, allowing users to easily find related works and track the impact of a particular paper.
• Full-text Search: Users can search the full text of documents, not just metadata, which improves the relevance and accuracy of search results.
• Author Disambiguation: CiteSeerX uses algorithms to disambiguate authors with similar names, helping users find all works by a particular author.
• Document Clustering: The system groups similar documents together, making it easier to find related research.
• Open Access: CiteSeerX provides free access to its indexed documents, supporting the open access movement in academia.

Technical Infrastructure

CiteSeerX is built on a distributed architecture that uses a combination of web crawlers, parsers, and databases to collect, process, and store academic papers. The system is designed to handle large volumes of data and to provide fast and reliable search capabilities.

The backend of CiteSeerX is implemented using open-source technologies such as Apache Solr for search indexing and PostgreSQL for database management. The system also employs machine learning techniques for tasks such as citation extraction and author disambiguation.

Impact and Usage

CiteSeerX has had a significant impact on the way researchers access and use academic literature. It has been widely used by students, academics, and professionals in the field of computer science and beyond. The platform has also inspired the development of other academic search engines and digital libraries.

Also see

• Google Scholar
• arXiv
• PubMed
• Digital Object Identifier
• Open access

External links

• Official website