Microsoft Academic Search

Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research. It covers more than 27 million publications and over 16 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.

Features

Search Results

The principle feature of Microsoft Academic Search is of course its search functionality. With it, you can search within any of the previously mentioned areas. For example, enter an author’s name; if the system has a perfect match, it will take you to the author’s profile page which we will discuss in more detail shortly. If there are multiple potential matches, it will provide a list of them, and you can locate the one you are looking for using the author’s picture or institution.

You can also explore the information that Microsoft Academic Search offers by domain. From the home page, choose a domain such as Computer Science. From there, you can explore the top papers, authors, conferences, and journals within that domain as well as within its subdomains.

Profile Pages

Each of the entities covered by Microsoft Academic Search has its own dedicated profile page.

On an author’s profile page, you can get detailed information about the author such as his or her institution, publications, research interests, and homepage. You can also view the author’s historical publication and citation frequency. If you want to be notified when new publications and information about an author are available, you can subscribe to the author by clicking “subscribe.” You can also embed the author’s publication list into your own website.

From the author profile page, you can quickly access profile pages of the author’s organization, papers, co-authors, journals, and conferences. Each of these profile pages contains similarly detailed information.

Visual Explorer

Visual Explorer allows you to visualize the relationships between researchers who have coauthored publications or cited each other. To get to Visual Explorer, click the “Citation Graph” button on the left side of an author’s profile page. In Visual Explorer, each circle represents an author with top collaborators positioned closer together. You can view their relationships in three ways.

Coauthor Graph mode allows you to visualize the researchers who have collaborated with a particular researcher. If you hover over the line between two authors, the number of publications they have coauthored is displayed. Clicking on this number takes you to a list of these publications.

Citation Graph mode does the same thing, but with citations rather than coauthorships, while Coauthor Path mode shows how any two given researchers are connected to each other, rather than focusing on one researcher.

Call for Papers

If you want detailed information about paper submissions and upcoming computer science conferences, take a look at the Call for Papers calendar. You can browse conferences by domain as well as region. Using the timeline, you can view the dates of each conference and filter by time period. Clicking “map view” will show you the conference locations.

Domain Trend

The domain trend page displays trends in the number of publications of the subdomains of computer science. All you need to do is to select the subdomains you are interested in, select a time interval, and it will show you the relative and absolute volume of publications in the selected areas over the selected time interval. It also displays the top authors in those areas during that time period.

Currently, the Call for Papers and Domain Trend features are only available in the Computer Science domain.

User Edit Function

User are invited to edit and correct any errors or omissions they spot. On any profile page, you can click the “edit” button, and after signing in you can modify the information contained on that page. Once submitted, your changes will be incorporated into the live site after manual verification by our editors.

Data Coverage

Microsoft Academic Search covers more than 27.1 million publications and 16.1 million authors as of June 2011, with weekly update since November 2009. The following table contains information about data coverage history:

Date	Paper Count	Citation Count	Author Count	Domain Covered
2009/12	4.5 million	19.4 million	N/A	Computer Science
2010/3	5.2 million	23.9 million	N/A	Computer Science
2010/5	5.6 million	26.2 million	N/A	Computer Science
2010/7	6.0 million	29.0 million	N/A	Computer Science
2010/9	7.0 million	36.6 million	N/A	Computer Science
2010/12	7.6 million	38.4 million	9.7 million	Computer Science
2011/3	15.7 million	49.3 million	11.0 million	Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics
2011/6	27.1 million	80.0 million	16.2 million	Biology & Biochemistry, Clinical Medicine, Computer Science, Chemistry, Economics & Business, Engineering, Immunology, Mathematics, Microbiology, Molecular Biology & Genetics, Neuroscience & Behavior, Pharmacology & Toxicology, Psychiatry & Psychology, Physics

Competitors

Other products in the area are Google Scholar, Elsevier's Scirus, and the open source project CiteSeer.

See also

• Citation index
• DBLP (Digital Bibliography & Library Project)
• CiteSeerX
• Google Scholar
• List of academic databases and search engines
• Scirus

External links

• Microsoft Academic Search website