Microsoft Academic Search in beta

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Introduction

See also Bibliometrics | Google scholar | Scirus | Search engines | Web 2.0

Microsoft Academic Search in beta is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research. It covers more than 38 million publications and over 19 million authors across a variety of domains with updates added each week. This large collection of data has also allowed users to create several innovative ways to visualize and explore academic papers, authors, conferences, and journals.

"In beta" 2011 & 2012

In 2012, Microsoft's Academic search engine provides access to a range of content explicitly revealed on the home page. When searching topics such as "chronic obstructive pulmonary disease", the search engine finds about 10,500 results. A comparable search in Google scholar returns 13,000 results. Microsoft's Academic search engine does not index any legal materials or patents, something Google scholar now does. The various subject areas that are covered in Academic search now appear on the home page and show, at a glance, the scope and coverage of the database.

Some other features in Academic search are worth mentioning. Citations include links to fulltext sources, if and when they are available. An initial list will not provide snippet views; but by clicking on titles, a graphical view of citations is shown as well as a snippet view. A graph indicates citation trends covering the publications and number of citations to the main article. Citations that are listed below the graph are clickable for links to abstracts and fulltext content. An export button allows the searcher to download citations in standard bibliographic formats.

Obviously, Academic search is not as well known as Google scholar. But it might be worth examining and using in searching for the grey literature. One of the advantages of Academic search is that the snippet view is useful in determining whether a hit is worth exploring. Additionally, Microsoft relies on title words in order to determine relevancy of items. Its interactive social qualities are superior to Google scholar's; the help screen in Academic search also provides further information about the search engine's capabilities.

Microsoft's Academic Search has been around 2011 or earlier. This is interesting given that Microsoft had announced only the year before that it was retiring the project. Since 2004, Google scholar has been trying to improve its presentation and listing of results - and has come a long way. The inclusion of legal materials and patents has been a boon for scholars, lawyers and law librarians. However, its lack of transparency in its indexing practices and coverage make it difficult to use with confidence for most scholarly areas. As a browsing tool, it is acceptable but not so much for performing structured literature reviews.

Profile pages

Microsoft's Academic search profile pages provide a way for you as a UBC scholar to track your scholarship – and connect with others within your discipline. Google scholar performs a similar function. You can check out who is citing you and your publications, see how your citations are graphed over time and compute other citation metrics. Make your profile public so your students can see what you are up to -- contact me for more information.

Windows Live Academic Search phased out in 2008

In 2008, Microsoft made the decision to phase out its original scholarly search engine called Windows Live Academic Search. This announcement came at about the same time that Microsoft decided to get out its digitization project of print books. Curiously, Microsoft said it would try to integrate the scholarly materials and the digitized content into Bing, its web search engine; later, it announced it would send all of its digital content to the publishers whose works they digitized. In launching Academic Search originally, it received a couple of good reviews and was called a solid competitor to Google scholar. One reviewer said it "...allowed users to search across the web for academic journals, databases like PubMed and OA repositories". However, Academic Search failed to make improvements fast enough or promote itself enough in order to compete on a level playing field with Google scholar. One of the benefits of Academic Search was that it pointed searchers to print books and articles in local libraries. One of the early problems with Academic search was the criticism that it lacked firepower to handle the sheer number of search requests, and that consequently response times were slow.

Future of the web's 'Academic Search space'

Time will tell whether the scholarly search space will ever be a truly open search space or whether it will be proprietarized for years to come. But librarians should be planning on better tools for themselves. The semantic web and web 3.0 may offer opportunities for a better, academic search space - one that can integrate relevant documents and data in the future.

References

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