CiteSeer, in the past known as ResearchIndex, is a public specialty search engine and digital library that was created by researchers Dr. Steve Lawrence, Kurt Bollacker and Lee Giles while they were at the NEC Research Institute (now NEC Corporation Labs), Princeton, New Jersey, USA. CiteSeer crawls for and harvests academic scientific documents and uses autonomous citation indexing to permit querying by citation or by document. Currently, it is hosted on the World Wide Web at the School of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University and has over 700,000 documents, primarily in the fields of computer science and information science and engineering. It has recently been extended to academic documents in business, SmealSearch, and in e-business, eBizSearch. CiteSeer also freely provides Open Archives Initiative Metadata of all indexed documents and links documents when possible to other sources of metadata such as DBLP and the Association for Computing Machinery 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 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.

=See also=

= External links =