Well, well, well. It’s time to say hello to a new database (it’s also a “test bed) from a company that once offered something similar.
Here’s a new “Academic Search” database (beta) from Microsoft (technically, it’s from Microsoft Research) that, according to its homepage, allows you to search over 3.3 million academic papers in the computer sciences.
Background
Microsoft’s previous effort in this area, Windows Live Academic was launched in April, 2006 and was gone by May, 2008.
Here’s a copy of the Live Academic Home Page via The Wayback Machine to get you started if you want to start comparing with the defunct Windows Live Academic service.
With the caveat that it’s the first day and there is no documentation available. I think MS Research is off to a solid start especially when you compare it with the Live Academic product. That said, they still have a lot of work to do. Of course, all of this is moot if this is simply a technology test.
What the Help Page Tells Us
+ “A free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia, and it is also a test-bed for our object-level vertical search research.”
+ An brief explanation of how results are ranked
+ Academic papers about the technology used to build Academic Search (beta)
+ Search and result page help
The Home Page and Top-Ranked Papers
The Academic Search home page offers direct links to top-ranked papers (by two citation measures, in-domain citations and total citations) in more than 20 computer science domains. Here’s a link to the top-ranked papers (in this database) about Computer Education topics.
Btw, CiteSeer from Penn St. University offered subject-specific search engine for computer science and related disciplines for over 10 years. Now a new version of the service is in beta, it’s named CiteSeerX. Btw, we noticed many links to CiteSeer in the Academic Search.
Searching
The tabbed home page allows you to search for papers, by author, by conferences, and by journals.
Now, let’s look at each tab with some sample searches:
The papers tab is the default and searches words in the title and in the abstract. Here’s a search for the term “ethernet”. Search terms are highlighted in the snippets, lists of related authors, conferences, and journals can be found in the right rail. There are two boxes near the top of the page that allow you to refine your results by year.
An actual result includes the title, authors name(s), publication year, journal or source name, and the number of citations the paper has (in this database). It’s going to take someone like Dr. Peter Jacso to do some research and determine how accurate the citation counts are. He recently did this research with Google Scholar.
A result entry has a few clickable items:
+ Title
+ Author(s) Name
+ Citation Count
Clicking the author link runs an “author search” and takes you to a page for that specific author (an object detail page). There, you’ll find a listing all of that authors articles in the database, citation counts, a link to the authors home page, etc.
One of the most interesting parts of the database is the data visualization tool located “author pages”. Look for the “Visual Explorer” link on the top right of the page.
From the help page:
Microsoft Academic Search automatically summarizes the co-author information for each author. Through visual explorer, user can browse the top co-authors of authors by clicking one author in the displayed graph.
Here’s an example of Visual Explorer for Vint Cerf (now at Google, the author page says something else)
Selecting the title or citation count links moves you to a page with a complete abstract, links to download the full text of the paper, In some cases, they are to a fee-based digital library while at other times they are free. Also, each paper has a hypertext list of a papers references that are listed in the database.
Question. If MS expands this project will they consider a link resolving service for libraries?
Other Searches
An author search allows you to either enter an authors name (just a last name will also work) and get a list of results. Note: We were also able to enter a few search terms get results. In other words, it searches more than the authors name.
A conference search will limit your results to only conference publications and proceedings. Clicking the conference title will give you a hypertext list of all of the papers in that specific volume along with a total citation count (all articles). Finally, you can limit your results by year, citation count, and rank. Wow, look at this. If you cursor over the word “rank” it actually provides a brief explanation. (-:
Last but not least, a search by journal (we need a journal list) allows you to enter search terms and then see all of the articles in the database from a specific journal. For example, here’s a search for GIS. A results list shows the journal title first. Click and you’ll see a list with the titles of all papers in the database from that specific publication independent of date. Again, you can sort by year, citations and rank.
The papers themselves appear to be coming from a wide variety of fee and free services. This article lists several locations to find the article for free.
There is also an advanced search interface that cannot be directly linked to. It allows you to simultaneously search several fields:
+ Keywords
+ Paper Title
+ Author
+ Conference
+ Journal
+ Year
Final Thoughts
As we said before, this is the first day the database is live. We have a lot of questions that need answering. One that we have mentioned to this point is MS Academic Search just a research project or something that the company plans on expanding over time by adding more disciplines. Again, we think this database has a much better feel than what MS used to offer. We would love to know precisely what the short and long term future holds for Academic Search
Stay Tuned!
