Citeseer was the first citation enhanced bibliographic database which provided free available citation data for the scientific literature. It was therefore the first serious competitior for the kings of citation data ISI/Thomson Scientific. Citseer covered the literature of computer and information science. Started in 1997 at the NEC Research Institute, Princeton, New Jersey it has come a long way. Since it’s inception, the original CiteSeer grew to index over 750,000 documents and served over 1.5 million requests daily, pushing the limits of the system’s capabilities.
The next Generation Citeseer, CiteseerX, is now available for search.
My first impression is a really nice intuitive layout, and a fast search performance. I will keep pointing students to this free resource during my classes on citation analysis.
My comment is not related to this post. I just came across your post dated 23 November 2006 on your Dutch weblog about my article on the cognitive model for the invisible Web in Journal of Documentation. First of all, I thank you for your valuable comments on the paper and secondly, I’d like to inform you that I have developed the model after the publication of that paper. If you are interested to learn more about it please email me.
Interesting post. But was Citeseer really the first free citation enhanced database? I know Spires-Hep was probably there earlier with citation information (see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/papers/history.html). Perhaps there are still others
According to your timeline of Spires, they only started in 2000 with their citation reports. But admittedly, it should have read “one of the earliest” rather than first. They started in 1997 though….