A blog about the dblp computer science bibliography

Dr. Michael Ley to receive the ACM Distinguished Service Award

The world’s largest computing society, the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), has bestowed its prestigious ACM Distinguished Service Award 2019 on computer scientist Dr. Michael Ley of Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz-Center for Informatics and of Trier University. ACM thus recognizes Dr. Ley’s achievement in the creation and unceasing editorial curation of the dblp computer science bibliography. Dr. Ley has developed dblp from a small and initially highly specialized collection of metadata about scholarly publications in the fields of “data bases (db) and logic programming (lp)” into the most comprehensive, open bibliographic information service for all disciplines of computer science. The database was created by Dr. Ley at the University of Trier in 1993. Today, it is operated by Dr. Ley and Read more…

By Michael Gerke, ago

dblp computer science bibliography surpasses 5 million publications

On March 23rd, 2020, the dblp computer science bibliography indexed its 5 millionth publication. By doing so, the world’s largest openly accessible metadata collection of computer science publications doubled in size during the course of just six years. Thus, dblp consolidates its role as an export hit from Germany, which is of world renown among the international computer science community. Modern research requires the immediate and comprehensive access to current publications to meet the needs of an ever faster evolving and ever more complex research landscape. However, high-quality metadata and information about recent publications are often quite difficult to obtain. Search engines like Google allow a broad insight into the Internet but have neither guarantees of data quality, nor completeness, Read more…

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

Name disambiguation suffixes in dblp

At the end of March 2020 dblp provides bibliographies for almost 2.5 million scientists. With this number, it is not surprising that we have namesakes – scientists with the exact same name. For historical reasons, all persons in dblp must have different names. We circumvent this problem by assigning numeric suffixes to names that are not unique. E.g., there are multiple Thomas Müller in dblp. So we name them Thomas Müller 0001, Thomas Müller 0002 and so on. See our FAQ here for more details. Identifying authors with the same name is a  very important task. For example, the bibliography of Thomas Müller 0001 should not list papers by another Thomas Müller. This is a very common problem. I recently Read more…

By Florian Reitz, ago

Corrections in dblp

Our primary goal is to ensure that bibliographies (list of publications) of authors in dblp are correct. This means that all publications of a person should be listed in the same list and that a list should contain only publications from one specific person. It can be difficult to ensure this and despite our best efforts, we assign publications to the wrong publication list. Because of this, we frequently check our data set and correct mistakes. The following figure shows the number of corrections we made in the last twenty years. In a merge correction, two (or more) publication lists are merged. E.g., we discover that A. Jones and Adam Jones are the same person. A split fixes a defect where Read more…

By Florian Reitz, ago

Unpaywalled article links

The dblp computer science bibliography provides more than 5 million hyperlinks for research publications. Most of those links point to article landing pages within a publisher’s digital library. A growing number of publishers have adopted the open access model of publishing, thereby allowing the dissemination of research results free of cost and without any access barrier. You may have noticed that we have recently begun to mark such hyperlinks in dblp with a special orange badge signalling their availability. (Please also note that this badge is still work in progress, and that there are still plenty of openly accessible articles in dblp that go unrecognized.) However, most publishers in computer science do still demand an active subscription or a fee Read more…

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

License change to CC0

Starting today, all of dblp’s data will be released under the CC0 1.0 Creative Commons Public Domain License. This affects all metadata releases, in particular the daily and monthly data dumps and data retrieved from the web APIs. This change will make it easier for you to reuse our data. In a nutshell, you can use our data without asking permission, for any purpose (including commercial purposes), and even without attributing it to us. However, we will very much appreciate if you mention dblp as the source of the data set and/or if you provide a hyperlink to https://dblp.org. Our previous license, the ODC-BY 1.0 Open Data Commons Attribution License, was selected as a fitting license back in 2011, when Read more…

By Florian Reitz, ago

Open citation data and dblp

You may not always notice this, but the dblp team is constantly working on the dblp website and its APIs in order to improve the quality of the services and the value for our users. Often these are just small details and fixes, but sometimes we introduce new features. Yet, in the past, we often rolled out those features silently with no major announcements. This has led to a number of improvements that many users of dblp may not be aware of. In order to make these features more widely known, we are starting this new “feature spotlight” series of blog posts. And the start will be a big one. Open citation data in computer science Most of the time, Read more…

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

Bibliographic database “dblp” celebrates silver anniversary

For more than 25 years now, the dblp computer science bibliography has been indexing and supporting international computer science research. Since today, the future of the database has also been secured at the Leibniz Center for Computer Science in Schloss Dagstuhl. On this occasion, a festive colloquium will be held at the University of Trier on Friday, November 23rd, 2018. Under the motto “25 years of dblp – 2^22 entries” the database celebrates the milestone of more than 4 million indexed computer science publications. As first keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum (Research Director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken and former member of the German Council of Science and Humanities) will give an insight into Read more…

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

External identifiers in dblp

There are now more than 60,000 manually confirmed external IDs linked with dblp author bibliographies. This is quite an improvement. Below you can see the number of external identifiers at the end of each year compared to the numbers in October 2018 As you can see, our definition of external identifier is a bit wider than usual. E.g., we include Twitter profiles here. ORCID, Google Scholar, Wikipedia and Twitter should be known to the readers. Wikidata is a LOD data store build on top of Wikpedia that provides query-able data. The others are GND: identifier from the German national Library see here ISNI: global authority file see here zbMath: biographies of Mathematicians see here Math Genealogy:   the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Stores relations between researchers Read more…

By Florian Reitz, ago