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, nor any semantic organization of search results. Commercial scholarly databases sell metadata as an expensive service, but in many disciplines (such as in computer science), their coverage is insufficient and the data quality is quite poor.
For over 25 years now, the dblp computer science bibliography has substantially contributed to solving this dilemma in the field of computer science by providing open, quality-checked, and curated bibliographic metadata. Via its website https://dblp.org, dblp provides an insight into the complex interrelationships and networks of international computer science research. In recent years, the service has grown to be a powerful tool that supports computer scientists worldwide in their search for articles, ideas and experts. The dblp team places particular emphasis on the reliability and quality of the metadata entries by employing a rigorous, manual data curation process. Also, all data is made openly available for reuse as a common good under the “CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication” license.
Today, dblp indexes more than 5 million scholarly articles, monographs, and collections, written by more than 2.4 million authors, thus being the world’s most comprehensive, openly accessible bibliographic database in computer science. Every year, the collection grows by more than 400,000 new entries; this corresponds to more than 1,600 new, curated entries per working day. Every day the dblp servers answer over one million queries, each month half a million users from all over the world visit dblp's website. The database has already been honored with several prizes such as the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.
The dblp computer science bibliography was founded in 1993 by Dr. Michael Ley at the University of Trier. In creating dblp, Ley reacted to the special publication culture in computer science, where often difficult to obtain conference contributions play a more important role than publications in scholarly journals. From 2010 to 2018, the database was operated jointly with Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics. Since the end of 2018, Schloss Dagstuhl has taken over the operation of dblp completely with its newly constituted dblp team in Trier, Germany, to ensure the long-term sustainability of the infrastructure.
