About the ACM Distinguished Service Award

Michael Ley was named recipient of the ACM Distinguished Service Award for creating, developing, and curating DBLP, an extraordinarily useful and influential online bibliographic resource that has changed the way computer scientists work.

Until the early 1990s, finding relevant literature and compiling the bibliographic references for a paper or a dissertation was a manual and tedious effort for students and authors. Ley, of the University of Trier and Schloss Dagstuhl − Leibniz Center for Informatics, created DBLP in 1993 to cover proceedings and journals from the fields of database systems and logic programming (from which the acronym “DBLP” arose). The author pages provided links to co-authors and corresponding table-of-contents entries, forming a browsable person-publication network. After positive feedback from the database community, Ley added data from further computer science disciplines.

Today, DBLP lists more than 5 million publications and is used to search for bibliographic entries (its original intent), as well as to evaluate persons or institutions, and to support program committee chairs, editors, and reviewers. Strengths of DBLP include the quality of its data, which results in a very low rate of errors, as well as the unique identification of authors. DBLP has changed the way computer scientists use bibliographic data and has become an invaluable asset for virtually every researcher in the field.

During the 1990s and 2000s, DBLP was largely a one-man endeavor. In the last decade, Ley organized a DBLP team at Schloss Dagstuhl − Leibniz Center for Informatics. Through DBLP, Ley has made the enormous body of published computer science research more accessible and useful to the entire community.