View source for How to search the computer science literature

These days many CS students just type a few keywords into Google and call it a literature search. Although this works for finding a few references, it's not a comprehensive search by any means. Instead of typing your keywords into Google, try the online resources below.

For each service, try this strategy. Find a few highly descriptive keywords of the area that you are researching, type them in to the search field, and download every paper that comes up which looks even remotely related. For every paper, turn to the last page and read through that paper's references. This will tell you the literature that those authors thought was important. This strategy, while time consuming, is likely to be far more effective than merely doing searches for keywords.

==Sites requiring organizational access==
* [http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm ACM Digital Library]
* [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ IEEE Xplore]
* [http://www.springer.com/east/home/computer?SGWID=5-146-0-0-0 Springer Computer Science]

==Free Sites==
* [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ CiteSeer]
* [http://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar]
* [http://www.reviews.com/ ACM Computing Reviews]
* [http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/ The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies]