Also, I don’t known about computer science, but for Health sciences in general, many publisher allow you to set citations alert on papers of interest. I.e., each time a paper important for your litterature is cited (including yours), it e-mails you the reference.

I find these tools very valuable to be informed of what is going on the specific domain I am working on.

Of course, this misses whatever citations that Google Scholar doesn’t pick up.

The link by Suresh, WhatToSee, looks very useful.

You can find related authors,related papers, papers citing a paper.

I think that such tool should be a social networking software and not a natural language processing.

We have built such a tool at HP Labs India. We plan to expose it as a service in future

Krishnan

The same base problem makes academic writings less useful (and thus less meaningful) to the entire community.

Solve the underlying problem.

The data is most certainly not available in structured format. Nor is it available from one place only. Even if you can parse the papers to recognize the citations, you have to link the citations to the papers. That is not easy. There are many ways to cite a paper, and several papers have almost the same titles and almost the same authors.

There are places to get you started. For example, in Computer Science, DBLP makes available a rather large list of papers as XML. The papers in the arxiv database can also, I presume, be indexed somehow.

Recognizing similarities between what the researcher is doing, and a given paper is also not trivial. It is probably similar to spam filtering. There may even be people who will try to cheat the system to get their papers recommended more often!

So, it is a difficult challenge, for many reasons. But it seems that as years go by, no progress is being made. I have seen zero progress in the last two years on this problem. None. Nada.

And it is not just the challenge in getting access to the data. For example, even open access archives (such as arxiv) are hard to monitor!

Citeseer was good back before Google Scholar. Now it is irrelevant. Its coverage is ridiculous.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/WhatToSee/

and it’s from an NLP researcher, to boot !

Scopus and/or Web of Science do a few of the things you’re looking for, not perfectly, but it’s a start.

I would argue it is a *bad* start.

Scopus knows about 11 of my papers, and one of them is not from me, so it knows about 10 of my papers. It thinks that my 2000 paper “Wavelet time entropy” is my most cited work (with 21 citations).

Should I trust Scopus? Is this an accurate picture? No. Not even close.

Google Scholar tells me otherwise. My RACOFI paper from 2003 is cited 39 times according to Google Scholar, yet it does not even exist on Scopus! My Slope One paper from 2005 is cited 36 times according to Google Scholar and it does not exist on Scopus! My Tag-cloud drawing paper from 2007 is cited 20 times according to Google and… it does not even exists on Scopus.

Even if you don’t trust the numbers Google Scholar gives you, these 3 papers I just gave you do exist. They have been repeatedly cited and there is even a wikipedia page about one of these papers. Yet, as far as Scopus is concerned, I have hardly been cited for my work after 2000… except for the Scale and translation invariant collaborative filtering systems paper…

Coverage matters a lot more to a researcher than precision. Missing 3 of my most important contributions is a big deal to me. I don’t care that it reports only 10 of my papers… I care that it misses my most important work though!!!

A tool that does not know about my important work, can’t possibly help me monitor upcoming papers efficiently.

Can’t believe that progress in this area is so slow, though there are some new initiatives (http://www.mendeley.com/).

We’re working to get something off the ground too. Would love to get more pointers to related work!