Visual Guide to finding non-patent prior art with CiteSeer

CiteSeer is another great free resource for finding non-patent prior art
Follow the Advanced Search link just below the search window.
You can search for results by an article's text, title, author, publication, or abstract.
Let's search for articles with the text 'touch screen camera focus'.
We can also restrict the results by year of publication, either by a specific year or range.  Since I'm looking art prior to 2005, let's get results published from 1994 to 2004.
Let's take a closer look at the result, Emerging Frameworks for Tangible User Interfaces by Brygg Ullmer.
Here's the article's abstract and bibliographic information.
If you can find the article on CiteSeer you should be able to download all of it by following the links at the top right of the page.
Scroll down and you'll see CiteSeer provides a list and link to the articles citations that are also in its database.
Let's check out Tangible Interaction Graphical Interpretation: A New approach to 3D Modeling by David Anderson.
Looks like a great piece of prior art!
If the cited article isn't at CiteSeer it will instead conduct a search for related results instead. Remember the date restrictions we had put on our results earlier in Advanced search are gone.
Sometimes you'll get an error either when you go to download an article or click on a search result or citation. You might try searching for the article elsewhere.  The articles downloaded from CiteSeer aren't always complete or in the right order, but that's only for a few percent of the articles on CiteSeer Back to Patent-Ed's Visual Guides to finding prior art  >>