Searching online book documents and analyzing book citations

Academic search engines and digital libraries provide convenient online search and access facilities for scientific publications. However, most existing systems do not include books in their collections although several books are freely available online. Academic books are different from papers in terms of their length, contents and structure. We argue that accounting for academic books is important in understanding and assessing scientific impact. We introduce an open-book search engine that extracts and indexes metadata, contents, and bibliography from online PDF book documents. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work gives a systematical study on building a search engine for books. We propose a hybrid approach for extracting title and authors from a book that combines results from CiteSeer, a rule based extractor, and a SVM based extractor, leveraging web knowledge. For "table of contents" recognition, we propose rules based on multiple regularities based on numbering and ordering. In addition, we study bibliography extraction and citation parsing for a large dataset of books. Finally, we use the multiple fields available in books to rank books in response to search queries. Our system can effectively extract metadata and contents from large collections of online books and provides efficient book search and retrieval facilities.