We have received several feedback items indicating that the MetaCart feature is not intuitive at first glance.  There is definitely a need to document this useful feature, so I will describe it here until there is time to update the site documentation accordingly.

The MetaCart is intended to serve as a shopping cart for metadata (hence the somewhat odd name), but unlike a traditional shopping cart, you do not have to pay anything for the items you check out.  As you search and browse CiteSeerX you will find links named "Add To MetaCart".  Click on these to save a document record into your session.  For now, JavaScript is required as the facility is implemented using AJAX.

Whenever you would like to view or download items in your cart, click on the "MetaCart" link found at the top right corner of nearly every page.  Here you will be given the option to download metadata records in BibTeX or Refer/BibIX format.  Currently, this is the sole means of obtaining BibTeX records from documents in CiteSeerX.  We may add a facility to get single BibTeX records from document summary pages in the future if there is demand for that.

TIP: You can also use the MetaCart as a temporary workspace where you can save documents as you use CiteSeerX.  Items in the MetaCart are hyperlinked to the document summary page (when we have the corresponding PDF or PS file) or to the corresponding citation search page (when we have only citation data for a record).  If you want to keep track of your browsing history, just add interesting documents to your MetaCart and use it to quickly navigate among documents you have saved.

CiteSeerX will be unavailable during the nights of Sunday, March 9th and Thursday, March 13th between 9PM and 7AM EST while Penn State works on the power system in our server room.  This will affect the legacy CiteSeer as well.  During the outages, all of our systems will need to be powered off so there will not even be a "service unavailable" page.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

CiteSeerX has just launched!  This year marks the 10th anniversary of CiteSeer's service to the research community and we are proud to celebrate by revitalizing the project with a brand new system architecture.  Our new system is a ground-up rewrite of the legacy CiteSeer application, designed to address scalability, extensibility, and usability issues that were limiting our ability to keep up with new content and technologies.  We think that CiteSeerX represents a major enhancement over the old system in terms of our stated goals and we hope you agree.

At the time of this writing, we have extended the size of our collection to approximately 810K documents and over 14 million citations.  This represents over 200K more unique documents than can be found in the legacy system, since we filtered out about 150K duplicate records during the conversion process.  Our crawlers have been working hard to scour the web for new content, and we currently have half a million more PDF and PostScript files queued for ingestion.  Not all will pass our filtration system, but stay tuned for large content updates!

CiteSeerX is still in alpha phase until we complete our initial high-volume crawl cycle.  This means that not all features will be enabled for the next couple of weeks.  In particular, user-submitted corrections and content submissions are currently disabled, as well as our new content notification system.  We think many users will enjoy these new and greatly enhanced features and we are working to enable them as quickly as we can.  In the meantime, we hope you explore the several new features that are currently operational, particularly within the MyCiteSeer personal content portal.

Stay tuned for further updates on this page as we roll out new features or enhance old ones.  Please let us know what you think through our feedback channel. We hope you enjoy CiteSeerX!