Citeseer

Perhaps the NEC project most valued by computer scientists is Citeseer developed by Steve Lawrence, with help from Lee Giles and Kurt Bollacker and others. Citeseer is a free web-based service that scans the internet for computer science technical reports, parses the citations and cross-links the papers. You can use Citeseer to see, based on citations, which papers are most relevant to a particular topic. You can sort papers or even computer scientists (not necessarily a good thing). Since the papers are cached you also quickly get hold of old versions of many papers.

With the changes at NEC, I often get asked what will happen to Citeseer. Don't worry--Citeseer will soon have a new safe home and will continue to provide computer scientists with an easy way to track down papers.