Look for the publication year of the paper. (Revised to connect to Google Scholar.)

PublicationYearSearch.java

package evernote;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLEncoder;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class PublicationYearSearch {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		int year = getPublicationYear(args[0]);
		System.out.print(year);
		if (year < 0) {
			System.exit(1);
		}
	}

	public static int getPublicationYear(String title) {
		int year = -1;
		HttpURLConnection conn = null;
		BufferedReader reader = null;
		BufferedWriter writer = null;
		try {
			// Build query URL.
			StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
			sb.append("http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en");
			sb.append("&q=%22");
			sb.append(URLEncoder.encode(title, "UTF-8"));
			sb.append("%22");
			String urlString = sb.toString();

			// Open HTTP connection.
			URL url = new URL(urlString);
			conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
			conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.44 Safari/534.7");
			conn.setRequestProperty("Referer", urlString);
			conn.connect();
			reader = new BufferedReader(
					new InputStreamReader((conn.getInputStream())));

			// Compile regex pattern to look for.
			Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<div class=\"gs_a\">.+?([0-9]+) - [a-zA-Z0-9.]+</div>");

			// Load content.
			String line, br = System.getProperty("line.separator");
			writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("download.html"));
			while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
				writer.write(line);
				writer.write(br);

				// Look for matchings.
				Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(line);
				while (matcher.find()) {
					String match = matcher.group(1);

					// Get publication year if possible.
					try {
						year = Integer.parseInt(match);
					} catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
						continue;
					}
					break;
				}
				if (year >= 0) break;
			}
		} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} finally {
			try {
				if (conn != null) conn.disconnect();
				if (reader != null) reader.close();
				if (writer != null) writer.close();
			} catch (IOException e) {
				// Do nothing.
			}
		}
		return year;
	}
}