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That's what CiteSeer was supposed to do, unfortunately they quit halfway there.

So, what you are saying is, that it doesn't exist? Why is no one building this? I understand, that there is less demand than for web search. But there still is a lot of demand from smart and skilled people, no?

It's a question of academic paywalls. If all journal papers were freely available it would have been done by now.

Thx for your reply. Makes sense. Other than abstracts, the reference are usually behind a pay wall.

But how does, e.g. Google Scholar estimate the number of citations? Do they only look at papers which are not behind a pay wall or do they buy a subscription to all journals?

It still buggles my mind, that the science loving google founders Larry and Brian haven't tackled this yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com