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  >>

Visual Guide to finding non-patent prior art with ACM's Digital Library

ACM's Digital Library is a great place to find non-patent prior art.
There are lots of great ways to sort and restrict your searches.  I can browse by journal, Special Interest Groups, Conferences, Special Collections.
Let's try an Advanced Search.  Follow the link at the upper left of the page.
As you can see we have a lot of great options.  I can search by keywords, phrases, publication, year published, conference, and identification codes.
Let's try searching for 'touch screen camera focus'.
I can only restrict the publishing date of the results by the entire year, nothing more specific.
But that's ok because it looks like I got some great results to search through, let's scroll down and check one out...
Tapping and Circling selections on pen-based devices: evidence of different performance-shaping factors by Sachi Mizobuchi and Michiaki Yasumura  looks really interesting.
Here I can get the article's bibliographic information  Unfortunately to view the entire article I'll have to buy, rent it, or subscribe to ACM's Digital library.
I can scroll down and read the abstract to make sure it's a result I may be interested in purchasing later.
ACM's Digital libraries is actually one of the best deals for access to large amounts of non-patent prior art.  A year long subscription is less than $200,  that's less than $17 dollars a month for complete year of access and downloading from their Digital library.
We can also rent the article with DeepDyve, there's a link in the upper right corner.
Ok we know the name of the article we're looking for, let's try searching for 'tapping vs. circling pen-based devices'.
There it is: the top result.
Follow the link...
We can read the abstract but to access the entire document we'll have to rent it.
Click on the bright green button 'Rent to View Full Text' in the upper right corner.
There are different options, but Deepdyve is even a better deal than ACM, but your access will be restricted again after a certain amount of time.  Make sure to make the most of it while you do have access to it.