Citeseer

CiteSeer is a public speciality scientific and academic search engine and digital library that was created by researchers Dr. Steve Lawrence, Kurt Bollacker and Dr. Lee Giles while they were at the NEC Research Institute (now NEC Labs), Princeton, New Jersey, USA. CiteSeer crawls and harvests academic and scientific documents on the web and uses autonomous citation indexing to permit querying by citation or by document ranking them by citation impact. It is hosted on the World Wide Web at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, and has over 700,000 documents, primarily in the fields of computer and information science and engineering.

CiteSeer freely provides Open Archives Initiative metadata of all indexed documents and links indexed documents when possible to other sources of metadata such as DBLP and the ACM portal.

CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of academic and scientific literature. As a non-profit service that can be freely used by anyone, it has been considered as part of the open access movement that is attempting to change academic and scientific publishing to allow greater access to scientific literature.

The name is a pun. A 'sightseer' is a tourist who looks at the sights, so a 'cite seer' would be a researcher who looks at cited papers or an all knowing 'seer' of citations.

New CiteSeer Engines
The CiteSeer model has recently been extended to cover academic documents in business, SmealSearch, and in e-business, eBizSearch. For enhanced access and performance, mirrors of CiteSeer are now available at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Zürich and the National University of Singapore.

Next Generation CiteSeer (CiteSeerx)
The Next Generation CiteSeer, CiteSeerx, project has been started with funding from the National Science Foundation and Microsoft Research. This project will take CiteSeer to the next level as a search engine and digital library. As an example, research underway expands CiteSeer's notion of "contribution" to acknowledgments in addition to citations, which would make it the first automatically generated acknowledgment index. A beta version is currently available at the CiteSeer site.