This is a collection of bibliographies of scientific literature in computer science from various sources, covering most aspects of computer science. The collection currently contains about 850,000 references (mostly to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports). You can search or browse it (within categories). Then you can access either a BibTeX record (a type of bibliographic reference card), which often will give a link in some form or other (perhaps ftp), or you may be told that you can access as HTML or download, for example, a gzip file. You may not always be able to access the full text of the article, but you will certainly be able to find the appropriate reference. While the site is fast (and it is fairly utilitarian; what else would one expect from a site on computer science?), it took your reviewer a little time to work out exactly how it all works. However, once this was clear, it was obvious that the site could be invaluable for anyone doing a literature search or just looking for information on a particular subject.
Alf-Christian Achilles's The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies is a massive collection of close to 1000 bibliographies, updated monthly, that cover a wide range of fields in computer science. These fields include artificial intelligence, compiler technology, programming languages (including a special section on object-oriented programming), database research, distributed systems, networking and telecommunications, computer graphics and vision, logic programming, computational mathematics, neural networks, operating systems, parallel processing, and software engineering. Each bibliography in the collection is accessed via an HTML document that provides information on the author and the contents of the bibliography, and indicates other sites that carry the bibliography. The Collection is mirrored at a number of sites around the world and is searchable in a basic and an advanced mode, for individual articles as well as whole bibliographies.
The most amazing things about Alf-Christian Achilles' Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies are, of course, the numbers. Numbers like 1,000 (number of bibliographies), 740,000 (references to "journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports"), 9,000 (cross references), 30,000 (references with URLs to an online paper), and 2,000 (links to other bibliographic sites). Bibliographies are arranged in fourteen subject categories (artifical intelligence to typesetting), and searchable (four variables plus full text). For an admittedly "on the side project" of a Ph.D. student, this is a staggering resource. Note that users should read the detailed FAQ section before beginning and that the site is conveniently mirrored at nine sites around the world.
Computer Zeitung Nr. 39 vom 25. September 1997, NetztickerLiteratursuche: Eine umfangreiche Sammlung von Computerbibliographien ist auf dem FTP Server der University of Manitoba unter der Adresse ftp://ftp.cs.umanitob.ca/pub/bibliographies/index.html abgelegt. Die Literatursammlung wird monatlich auf den neuesten Stand gebracht. Sie enthaelt nach Angaben der Betreiber bislang 720.000 Verweise, darunter mehr als 9000 Werke, die weitere Literatur erschliessen.
Bibliographie: In der Ausgae 36 der Computer Zeitung hatten wir auf den kanadischen Link zu einer Bibliographiesammlung hingewiesen. Ein Leser machte uns darauf aufmerksam, dass diese Site in Deutschland erstellt wird und an der Universitaet Karlsruhe unter http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html abzurufen ist. Dort steht auch eine komfortable Suchmaschine zur Verfuegung. Bei der von uns genannten Adresse handelte es sich um eine Mirror-Page.
Online Issue: January, 1996 (Vol. 3, No. 6)
Week of January 8 - January 12 / 1996
The Computer Science Bibliography Collection is a collection of about 670 bibliographies in the field of computer science which mostly contain references to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports. It is the largest publicly accessible bibliographic reference in the computer science world according to the maintainers. Searches can be performed by a form-based interface. URL: http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html
Buecher: Die Universität Karlsruhe bietet unter der Netzadresse http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html dei Möglichkeit, Buecher, die mit Informatik zu tun haben, zu suchen. Dort sind mittlerweile mehr als 400.000 Verweise auf Informatikliteratur gespeichert.
This is such an excellent resource it deserves its own article. You can search many different bibliographies, including various computer graphics bibliographies, from here. It's now mirrored by many locations around the world - check the site for more info.
Heriot-Watt University Library
The variety of sources is impressive. The documents retrieved from the search results visualization query included papers from the ComputerHuman Interface, Digital Libraries, and Hypertext conferences of ACM; the IEEE Visualization conferences; the 8th World-Wide Web Conference; technical reports from the University of Maryland's highly respected research group; and from Dartmouth College-- just to name a few from the first 20 records. All of them had abstracts; many had links to the full-text version in PDF and/or HTML formats, and/or prototype systems. Journals providing nearly half the citations in CCSB include such prime titles as the Communications of the ACM, Journal of ACM, IBM Systems Journal, Microsoft Systems Journal, American Statistician, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, Psychological Reviews, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Byte, Artificial Intelligence, AI Expert, and almost all of the IEEE Transactions and ACM Transactions.
There is a Simple Search and an Advanced Search template. Basic Boolean operators, prefix searching, and truncation are available. In the former mode, searching for variant forms is automatic, so the query visual and search and result will retrieve the British and American spelling of the first word (visualization and visualisation, as well as possibly irrelevant forms for the topic like visually unless you use visuali rather than visual in your search). The gerund and plural forms are also searched automatically.
Searches can be limited to items that have the source documents online. In the Advanced Search mode you have to use the * suffix (incorrectly called the prefix in the help file) for truncation, except for a title field search where stemming is automatic. Searches can be optionally limited to the title field and to a time period. Case sensitivity can be specified. Author searches are possible in an unusually flexible way. Sticking the initial of the first name of the author after the last name--MillerP, for example--will retrieve several variations irrespective of the order of name elements in the references, i.e. Peter Miller; Miller Peter; Miller, Peter; Miller, P.; Miller J. P., etc. Try to do that in a cross-database search on the venerable fee-based hosts. Results can be sorted by relevance or date, and displayed as a short headline or in full format. The short headline is more useful in the Simple Search mode because it includes the exact source citation. The latter is in BibTex format (widely popular among computer scientists for handling formulas, Greek characters, and the like). The BibTex format is visually not attractive, but includes what the typical abstracting and indexing records include about an item--and then some. Very often there is a hotlink to the full text of the document in HTML, PDF, or Postscript format, to a PowerPoint presentation file, or to a demo site. From within the records, author searches can be launched. The bibliography source from which the item is taken appears in front of every item, and is also hotlinked for launching a search to retrieve all the items from that source. The database has impressive statistics about the distribution of items by document types, publication years, and major subcategories (databases, neural systems, human-computer interaction, logic programming). Each bibliography collection, in turn, includes statistics about its features, such as total number of items in the bibliography, the number of items available online, the latest update, or the presence of data elements (title, author, publication year, ISSN, pagination, subject). This is exactly the kind of information I have long urged file producers to include in their promotional materials ("A Proposal for Database Nutrition and Ingredient Labeling," DATABASE, February 1993), and is just one more reason to pick this excellent resource.
