Review: Microsoft Academic search with a very personal touch

Microsoft’s newly launched Windows Live Academic Search site, now available in beta, is a potentially valuable new tool for both academics and information professionals. A member of the Microsoft family of Live Search products, it offers the ability to search content for free in 4,300 scholarly journals, as well as the web.

The homepage is a little off-putting. Following the example of Google Scholar , it has a single search box at the top of the page, which makes it look nice and simple. But unlike Google Scholar, the search box is succeeded by a clunky explanation of how it works – “When you execute a query, you will be presented with an interface that looks like this” – and a list of FAQs, all of which could have been hived off into a separate Help section.

Once you enter a search term and go onto the results page, things improve enormously. For example, if you type in “objectoriented programming”
(including the quote marks), the search box at the top of the Results page displays the term you entered but you can use it again for your next search.

Underneath the search box are five tabs –Web, News, Images, Feeds, Academic – and a down arrow, which is used for creating and finding macros. The Academic tab is highlighted by default: Live Academic Search searches academic sources first.

Hovering mouse preview

Below the tabs on the Results page, a sentence on the left of the screen will tell you it is displaying the first few relevant articles of however many results it has found. These results are clearly displayed with article name, journal title and journal authors, and the search term is highlighted in bold.

As you place your mouse pointer over each result, a preview pane on the right displays the abstract for the article highlighted. If the article is freely available, you can click on the title to go to the full article. Alternatively, you can search the web for a copy. The preview pane also has BibTeX and EndNote buttons, so you can see formatted citation options in the preview pane.

You can sort the search results by relevance, date, author, journal and conference. This is just as well when there are more than 11,000 results. The bad news is that there doesn’t seem to be a way of further refining the search to pick out only the most relevant of those 11,000.

It seems that the only way to get through them all is by scrolling through. There is a slider, which allows you to show more or less information for each result, but this is only moderately useful when you have a high number of results.

Relevance, according to the homepage, is decided by the closeness of the match and the authoritativeness of the paper, although it isn’t clear how Live Academic Search defines “authoritativeness”.

The Web, News, Images and Feeds tabs all work nicely. Clicking on News, for example, takes you to news stories about object-oriented programming:
this time there are 784,943 of them.

Disappointingly, there is no Advanced Search button, although it is possible to carry out Boolean searches. For example, searching on “Higgs boson” (the subatomic particle whose existence has not yet been proved, but which will have to be if the standard model of physics is
to work) brings 4,358 results, while searching on ‘“Higgs boson” AND “particle”’ brings 1,410 results.

A down arrow button enables you to create macros (advanced search modifiers), but only if you are registered as a Windows Live or MSN user. The macro creation functionality works well, letting you specify a search term and preferred sites for searching, and you can share the macro with other users if you choose.

Web 2.0 personalisation

An Add button lets you specify websites to add to your personalised page so that news stories referring to your search term are displayed automatically. You can also see news stories from broader areas, such as health or technology.

There are other signs that the site is still a work in progress: it can be quite slow and occasionally freezes altogether.

On the plus side, although Microsoft says it has indexed information from three main fields only (computer science, physics and electrical engineering), it has clearly embarked on the task of indexing other disciplines too. Try searching on “Charlotte Bronte”, for example, and
you’ll get roughly 30 academic results. Search for “human genome” and you’ll end up with more than 8,000. This at least suggests that Microsoft is committed to taking the site forward.

Live Academic Search is a mixed offering. The results and preview panes are clear and accessible, and the page personalisation features enable users to see at a glance news stories that are relevant to their particular interests. On the other hand, the site would profit greatly
from an advanced search capability.

IN BRIEF
http://academic.live.com

Free search of scholarly journals majors in physics, computer science and
electrical engineering

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