I’ve had this idea poking around in my head for a long time, but had never gotten around to actually implementing it. Finally this weekend, I did.
Finding citations for a paper is a useful but onerous process. You have to track down all of the work in the past that touched on similar ideas as your own, which amounts to spending hours searching through old journals looking for examples where your work has been done before. (In computer science, there are no new papers, just recyclings of ideas from the 60′s and 70′s).
In any case, this problem is no longer! With autocite, you can let the computer find the citations for you, or at least the most promising set of them. Here’s an example list of papers found based on inputting the abstract for my paper,
Piccolo:
- http://cs.mst.edu/documents/technical_reports/91-14.pdf
- http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Research/MCS/SDL/safire_compatibility_table.pdf
- http://cs.mst.edu/documents/technical_reports/92-02.pdf
- http://cs.mst.edu/documents/technical_reports/92-24.pdf
- http://staffweb.psdschools.org/wleggett/unitplan2/weblessonplan.pdf
- http://cr.yp.to/bib/1991/ecma-48.pdf
- http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/research/database/publications/vldb04_ranking.pdf
- http://sziami.cs.bme.hu/%7Eildi/seminar/2010_01/kapolnai_abs.pdf
- http://www.hpdc.org/2009/PDF/hursey.pdf
- http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/dkl/students.pdf
Okay, maybe it won’t solve all of your citation problems, but it’s somewhat entertaining to play with anyway. Try it out here:
If you’re curious, the code is available here, though it’s a bit of a mess.