CiteSeer is a free computer science article database and citation index hosted by Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology for academic articles. Similar citation indexes, such as Web of Science, found in many academic libraries in universities, costs libraries a significant portion of their budgets: thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars a year. CiteSeer, on the other hand is free. It doesn’t support the volume of articles that Web of Science boasts, but it is free, it is academic, and it is comprehensive!

As a citation index, a tool that tells you how many times and by who an article was cited (a great way to research and find additional articles), it is very good. It even creates a graph that shows over a time line how often the article was cited, giving you an instant visual cue how up to date your article is.

Here is a quick run down on its features:

• Uses Autonomous Citation Indexing (ACI)
• Computes citation statistics for all cited documents
• Allows browsing with reference linking
• Shows citation context
• Provides automatic notification through awareness and tracking
• Locates related documents
• Displays similar documents based on the percentage of matching sentences between documents
• Full-text indexing
• Query-sensitive summaries
• Citation graph analysis (explained above)
• Page images
• Up-to-date
• Powerful search, including using author initials and other metadata.
• Harvesting of articles through crawling, using search engines, and document submissions
• Extracts and provides metadata of articles
• Links to other metadata resources
• Freely available

Did I mention it was free? Every library in the world should link to this tool on their web page.

The basic mission of the tool is summed up on its about page:

CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeer aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of the scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

As a bonus, the full source code of CiteSeer is available at no cost for non-commercial use.

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