We present CiteSeer: an autonomous citation indexing system which indexes academic literature in electronic format (e.g. Postscript files on the Web). CiteSeer understands how to parse citations, identify citations to the same paper in different formats, and identify the context of citations in the body of articles. CiteSeer provides most of the advantages of traditional (manually constructed) citation indexes (e.g. the ISI citation indexes), including: literature retrieval by following citation links (e.g. by providing a list of papers that cite a given paper), the evaluation and ranking of papers, authors, journals, etc. based on the number of citations, and the identification of research trends. CiteSeer has many advantages over traditional citation indexes, including the ability to create more up-to-date databases which are not limited to a preselected set of journals or restricted by journal publication delays, completely autonomous operation with a corresponding reduction in cost, and powerful interactive browsing of the literature using the context of citations. Given a particular paper of interest, CiteSeer can display the context of how the paper is cited in subsequent publications. This context may contain a brief summary of the paper, another author's response to the paper, or subsequent work which builds upon the original article. CiteSeer allows the location of papers by keyword search or by citation links. Papers related to a given paper can be located using common citation information or word vector similarity. CiteSeer will soon be available for public use.

Introduction This proposal is submitted to the Library and Information Commission as a response to its Digital Libraries Research Call. The proposal is available online at http://openlib.org/home/krichel/CitEc.html. We are grateful to Nir Dagan for comments on an earlier draft. We welcome more feedback. The broad purpose of the proposal is to build an autonomous citation index for a large collection of scientific documents. This collection is the RePEc dataset of Economics research papers coordinated by the first applicant. In Section 2, we introduce that collection. The autonomous citation index will be prepared by the CiteSeer software, written by the second applicant, as introduced in Section 3. Section 4 details the aims of the applicants. In Section 5 deals with the management of the project. Section 6 describes the deliverables and sets out the timetable to achieve them. Section 7 concludes the application. 2RePEc RePEc is a decentralized collection of metad