Ashok's Assignment 5

Cite Seer: I hadn't used Cite Seer before but there are many things I like about it. For one you can easily search citations and
acknowledgements in addition to actual papers. The citations sections includes a graph of the number of citations and it disregards self citations leading to a better view of how the outside computer science world regards an author and whether they are creeping back into relelvence or not. One bad thing– since this was my first time playing around with Cite Seer, I looked it up on Wikipedia just to see what it was all about and found this in the entry : "CiteSeer has not been comprehensively updated since roughly 2000. It should not be used as a representative sampling of current research. A comparison of DBLP (see link below) references versus CiteSeer for well known authors such as Alex Pentland (MIT) or Ramesh Jain (UCI) (Example DBLP listings for Alex Pentland - http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/p/Pentland:Alex.html or Ramesh Jain - http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/j/Jain:Ramesh.html ) shows a regular number of publications (~9) each year in DBLP through 2007, however, CiteSeer has only one of their publications after 2000. Google Scholar on the other hand appears to be current." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citeseer). This unfortunatley calls into question some of the more current data (journal and relevance) provided by Cite Seer among other things.

ACM: I have used ACM before; also, many times an author links to an article provided by ACM or through a google search you come across an article on ACM. I like many of the search features. It's also nice to have the ability to browse rather than explicitly search the site for various articles because many times browsing through multiple articles allows you to come across articles you never would have imagined with just a normal keyword search. I like the advanced search as it allows easy access to a specific subsection of articles and has helpful options such as "Results must have accessible Full Text" which is great because you often want Full Text.

Google Scholar: I would venture to say that this is the easiest to use and is perfect for a preliminary search. Google Scholar aggregates which means that it may return in its results an article available on Cite Seer or ACM or some other service. The "easiness" referred to above is inherent in the fact that it's Google's interface, which we all use on a daily basis, and thus it kind of "makes sense" from the get go– for example under each cite there's a Cited by link with a number and a link for relevant articles which in our minds is analogous to similar webpages in the web search etc. One thing the Cited by link doesn't do is disregard self citations which can be misleading (but you can search through them easily enough). I also love the feature where you can switch over to a websearch for a given article– there have been multiple times when I can't get an article because I need to subscribe to a site and possibly pay and through the websearch I find the article posted on some professor's class website in seconds (this is great if you know the exact article you want).

Last modified 2 October 2007 at 10:07 am by Ashok.Basawapatna