Tools of the Trade

Indices, libraries, and such

The Instutute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers maintains a searchable online database, called Xplore, of all IEEE publications. The ones of immediate interest include Transactions on Communications, Transactions on Networking (published cooperatively with the ACM), and Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

The Digital Library of the Association for Computing Machinery is one of the two primary sources for computer science reference material. The ACM is the home of SIGCOMM, a special-interest group on data communication, which sponsors a number of conferences and journals; Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT); and many, many interesting proceedings.

The new(ish) kid on the block is Google Scholar, a new beta product from the search engine empire intended for scholarly searches.

CiteSeer is a free database originally developed by NEC Labs, and currently maintained at the Penn State University School of Information Sciences and Technology. It complements the IEEE and ACM databases in that it is less extensive, but includes sources outside of the two big societies. Think of CiteSeer as your indie record store of CS references.

For the mathematically inclined, the American Mathematical Society offers MathSciNet, a ‘comprehensive database covering the world's mathematical literature since 1940.’

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