This project is being developed jointly by
Matthew Richardson (University of Washington),
Rakesh Agrawal (IBM Almaden Research Center), and
Pedro Domingos (University of Washington).

We have two reasons for undertaking this project. The first is simply that we have been wishing that someone would create such a site so we could use it ourselves. Well, no one else was doing it, so we thought "why not us?". We are providing this service as a service to the research community, who is probably just as sick of typing in bibliographic references as we are.

Second, it makes for an interesting research project. Our research is focused on mass collaboration, and this domain is an excellent testbed for us to research, develop, and test our ideas on. As a result, expect to see improvements and additions to the site over time. If it isn't to your liking right now, please come back later and see what's changed! (And by all means, send us feedback about your decision not to use the site!)

CiteSeer is an invaluable resource for papers, one that we ourselves have used extensively. However, CiteSeer's bibliography entries are mainly extracted from online papers, and as a result are often incomplete and/or contain errors. Further, its trust in its users is absolute. Anyone can modify any bibliographic entry. We, on the other hand, provide a model of trust, in which you will see only the entries created or edited by your trusted users (and users that they trust, and so on)

Also, in CiteSeer each paper may have at most one bibliographic entry. We on the other hand realize that different people have different styles and preferences for their bibliography entries and so explicitly allow multiple entries to all refer to the same paper.

We provide bibliography-specific services, such as allowing you to upload, update, edit, manage, and maintain your personal bibliography online, downloading it whenever it is neccessary for writing a paper.

Also, we have imported the CiteSeer data (with many thanks to CiteSeer for making its data publicly available), so you need not worry that CiteSeer has an entry that we do not.

That said, if your purpose is to download a paper, follow reference links, or find out who has referenced a given paper, we encourage you to use CiteSeer.

Like CiteSeer, DBLP is a great source of bibliographic information. However, it is maintained manually by a small group of people, meaning there are only limited resources available for adding entries to the database and editing them. There is no way for you, the user, to add or edit entries in DBLP. As with CiteSeer, we have imported the DBLP bibliography into BibServ.

Your personal bib contains only those entries which you uploaded, or added to your personal bibliography. Your merged bib is the result of merging that with the personal bibliographies of other users. The merged bib depends, among other things, on who you trust.

Any entry which is also in your personal bibliography will have a checkmark () in this column.