WC present CifeSeer: an autonomous citation indexing system which indexes academic literature in electronic format (eg Postscript tiles on the Web). CiteSeer understands how to parse citations, identify citations to the same paper in different formats, and identify the context of citations in the body of articles. CiteSeer provides most of the advantages of traditional (manually constructed) citation indexes (eg the ISI citation indexes), including: literature retrieval by following citation links (eg by providing a list of papers that cite a given paper), the evaluation and ranking of papers, authors, journals, etc. based on the number of citations, and the identification of research trends. CiteSeer has many advantages over traditional citation indexes, including the ability to create more up-to-date databases which are not limited to a preselected set ofjournals or restricted by journal publication delays. completely autonomous operation with a corresponding reduction in cost, and powerful interactive browsing of the literature using the context of citations. Given a particular paper of interest, CiteSeer can display the context of how the paper is cited in subsequent publications. This context may contain a brief summary of the paper, another author’s response to the paper, or subsequent work which builds upon the original article. CitcSeer allows the location of papers by