UPI had a brief article on CiteSeerX, the article and citation search engine, on June 2 so I thought I’d mosey over and see how it was doing.

Pennsylvania State University runs CiteSeerX and it’s available to anybody at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu. It’s in beta, but isn’t everything?

The front page notes how many article and citations are searched on the engine, with the nice extra of how many articles and citations have been added in the last month. Actually you can search three different ways by this front page — by documents, by authors, and in tables. (the document search has an advanced feature that allows you to narrow your search by title, abstract, date, etc.)

I ran a documents search for autism and got 593 results. (If you choose to include citations you’ll get over 3300 results.) There’s an RSS feed for search results – nice! Click on the title of a paper and you’ll get lots of additional information on it, including citations (which take you usually to other papers of similar subject), actual related documents, and a version history. There is a function to add tags to the document (though none of the documents I looked had tags.) If you have a “My CiteSeer” account you can monitor for changes to the article as well.

I actually had a little trouble finding the actual ARTICLE amidst all the information. Look in the upper right corner. There’s a direct link to the article as well as a PDF of a cached version. Every article I looked at had the full text available.

Though the advanced search allowing me to find articles that had adults in the title and Asperger’s in the text was DEPRESSINGLY SMALL next to the regular search results for autism, the CiteSeerX RSS feeds will allow me to keep an eye out for new articles. Great engine.