DBLP FAQ: Why are many IEEE publications not listed in DBLP?

IEEE operates two huge digital libraries (DLs):

Xplore is the DL of the IEEE umbrella organization.
The Computer Society is the largest society inside of IEEE. IEEE CS has its own DL.

There is some overlap between both DLs, but many publications are only available from one of them. Journals or proceedings published by other IEEE societies than the Computer Society are only available from Xplore.

The old Computer Society DL was able to export BibTeX records for journal issues and proceedings volumes. These BibTeX contained DOIs which are a good starting point to produce DBLP entries.

The new Computer Society DL was no export funtion on the volume level - I have stopped to enter any Computer Society publication into DBLP.

Xplore has no export funtion, but it is simple to extract the bibliographic information (titles, authors, page numbers, DOIs) from the HTML pages with a script. For the majority of papers, Xplore lists only the initials of the authors' names, it does not list the full given names. Given names help to differentiate between different persons. DBLP now lists publications authored by more than 600000 individuals. We try to attribute each publication to the correct 'author page'. Without full given names this is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process. We try to find the missing information:

From the paper itself, if we have access to it.
From the Web: often personal home pages or conference programs contain the full names.
From DBLP: analysis of the coauthor graph and the subject of the paper often gives a clue to the authors' identities.

Unfortunately, we are NOT able to solve this 'puzzle' for all relevant IEEE publications. We simply haven't so enough time ...

You may help us:

Ask IEEE Computer Society to provide an export of bibliographic information (the Springer server (LNCS) is a good example ...).
Push IEEE to include full names into Xplore.
You may volunteer for the 'puzzle task':
- send me the title and URL of the Xplore publication you want to be included into DBLP,
- you get back the 'raw data' in the DBLP input format (a simple HTML-like format),
- complete the given names you are able to find out, and
- send me the completed version of the file ...

(October 2008)