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.