DBLPminer: A Tool for Exploring Bibliographic Data

Exploring publications in academia usually entails browsing a collection of published literature through either bibliographic databases or full featured digital libraries. Bibliographic databases contain an organized collection of references to published literature, whereas digital libraries host publications in full-text. Although lacking full-text content of a publication, bibliographies contain rich metadata such as publication titles, venues or contributing authors that offer clues to the search process. DBLP, one of the computer science bibliographic databases, supports publication exploration by providing interfaces for finding specific bibliographic records or collections of records by a specific author. However, it lacks means for deep search process. In this paper, we describe a tool called DBLPminer that indexes DBLP records by topic categories under the taxonomy of ACM Computing Classification System, and offers a prototype web application interface through which researchers can organize or search for DBLP records by topic categories, or find associated topics for a DBLP record. Preliminary analysis of the indexing algorithm's performance yields promising results. We also compare DBLPminer with several other bibliographic exploration tools.