Probably some of you already saw this, which Sven Aerts sent to some of us...
It seems it is much related to the database we were speaking about... Proabably a way of getting into it would be better by trying to join efforts with Google (and resources). We should make a paper describing what the current search engine is lacking, and how to overcome it, and then suggest it to the Google people...
This new Google service for academics (http://scholar.google.com) is indeed quite impressive, and will help many of us in many ways. Particularly impressive is the fact that they provide full, and most of the time accurate, reference for al publications: title, author, journal, page nrs. etc., together with a downloadable file of the publication if such can be found. Often, you either download the preprint, or find the full publication reference, but not both. Also the fact that they seem able to synthesise the often very different formats of references to a common standard makes it likely that the reference you get is more complete and accurate than the typical reference you find at the end of a paper.
Implicit in their method is also some kind of Impact factor/Science Citation ranking of papers, which I suppose is built on a subtle extension of the Pagerank algorithm taking into account more factors than just web links.
Perhaps one disadvantage of that for me (and I suppose most of us) personally is that my papers have a high PageRank as they are prominently visible on the web via Principia Cybernetica Web, but are usually published in journals/Proceedings with a low impact factor, since it is difficult to get this kind of theoretical, interdisciplinary work published in typical high impact journals such as Nature, Physical Review or Psychological Review.
Still, typing in typical keywords such as "collective intelligence" or "evolution of complexity" I did find some of my own papers without too much effort (e.g. in 27 th position), which means that someone who is really looking for this kind of work probably will find it, although they may have to skip over a number of less relevant publications (e.g. on complexity in the human genome) published in high impact journals.
In conclusion, to give ECCO papers more visibility, we should first of all make them available on a web server with high PageRank (e.g. Principia Cybernetica Web, or http://www.Arxiv.org ), provide plenty of links to them (to boost at least PageRank), preferably get them published in a high impact journal (Nature, Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences...), distribute plenty of copies to possibly interested other scientist worldwide, so that they are inclined to refer to them in their papers (to boost Citation scores), and of course, make them so interesting and convincing that many people would like to cite them!
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Francis Heylighen Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group Free University of Brussels http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
