

Ask HN: How do you search for CS results online? - gruseom

When I want to learn about the CS research in a particular area, Google is not my friend. Most search results are overrun by weeds: junky bibliographic sites that can only be called academic spam or publishers who want payment. I'm not going to spend $25 on a 1% chance that a paper is relevant to my problem. (An example of the kind of search I'm talking about is http://www.google.com/search?q=%22quad+view%22+finke).<p>So far, the best solution I've found is to use Google and Amazon's book search, augmented with some unsatisfying hacks to partly get around their restrictions. There must be a better way. What do you guys suggest?<p>Update: what percentage of CS research does the ACM Digital Library provide online? If it were close enough to 100%, I might fork out the $200, swearing loudly.
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mahmud
Don't feed the bastards; IEEE and ACM shall never see a dime from me.

Instead of paying them $200, pay ~$100 to your local big university library,
and get all the books, papers, and other research materials you can handle. I
am a member of George Mason University's library (go Patriots!) and I paid
$150 because I am not an alumnus. My perks include the entire ACM/IEEE
publications, of course, along with all the books I can handle :-)

(only bad thing is the parking, which can run up to $20 sometimes; but I
learned to go there after 7PM and stay til 12AM; taking home whatever books I
like.)

Online? CiteSeer + googling author's names and hoping for their .edu/~home-
pages.

~~~
gruseom
I'm disappointed, though not surprised, that the situation is as bad as
described in your and eugenejen's comments.

It's ironic that the literature surrounding commercial (or at least
production) software development is now exemplary in its openness while the
academic literature is locked in these backwater ghettos.

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eugenejen
ACM has almost all their journals/conferences digitized already.

IEEE has most stuffs since 1991 on line in computer society. I am not familiar
with the giant IEEE database.

SIAM has all stuffs on line. SIAM put new one in journal format. They put old
SIAM journals in digitial library.

AAAI has put all their stuffs on line. I think now they allow non member to
read them online also.

ACL seems lacking of enough funding to put all their computational linguist
research on line.

The other way to check the CS research is relying on Citeseer's cache. Most of
living/no-retire CS researchers put their papers on line for review after
1990s.

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neilc
At the times in the past when I haven't had institutional access, it has only
rarely been a problem: the vast majority of the papers I want to read are
freely-available online (CiteSeer, Google Scholar, DBLP, etc.). For the rare
occasions when I couldn't find a free copy of a paper, I would just ask a
friend of mine with ACM/IEEE/etc. access to get me a copy. The ACM/IEEE web
archives are a major annoyance in theory, but I wasn't too inconvenienced in
practice.

~~~
gruseom
Would you please spell it out for me, assuming that I am a complete novice?
How exactly do you get copies of actual papers from "CiteSeer, Google Scholar,
DBLP, etc."?

It may occur to you that if I'm too dumb to find papers I'm probably too dumb
to read them. Please ignore this :) I'm sure that a dumbed-down answer would
include some helpful tips for those of us who don't do this every day but have
a need to dive into the literature from time to time (and would probably
benefit from doing it more often).

~~~
neilc
Well, pretty simple: Google for the title of the paper. Some of the hits
you'll get will be behind paywalls (like the ACM DL), but there are usually
just PDFs you can freely download. Similarly with using Google Scholar and
CiteSeer, which often keeps cached copies of the PDFs it finds online. Failing
that, check the websites of the authors of the paper.

~~~
gruseom
Ok, I get it. That's pretty much what I've been doing, but at least this
thread clued me in to the fact that one can sometimes find pdfs on Citeseer.

Thanks.

