Libra (Academic Search)
Encyclopedia
Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine
developed by Microsoft Research
. It covers more than 36 million publications and over 18 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.
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.
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.
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.
Currently, the Call for Papers and Domain Trend features are only available in the Computer Science domain.
The following table contains information about data coverage history:
, Elsevier's Scirus
, and the open source project CiteSeer
.
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
developed by Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
. It covers more than 36 million publications and over 18 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.
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
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
. 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 |
| 2011/9 | 35.3 million | 18.9 million | Agricultural Science, Arts & Humanities, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics & Business, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geosciences, Materials Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Social Science, Space Science |
Competitors
Other products in the area are Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...
, Elsevier's Scirus
Scirus
Scirus is a comprehensive science-specific search engine. Like CiteSeerX and Google Scholar, it is focused on scientific information. Unlike CiteSeerX, Scirus is not only for computer sciences and IT and not all of the results include full text. It also sends its scientific search results to...
, and the open source project CiteSeer
CiteSeer
CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers. It is often considered to be the first automated citation indexing system and was considered a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. It was replaced by...
.
See also
- Citation indexCitation indexA citation index is a kind of bibliographic database, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. The first citation indices were legal citators such as Shepard's Citations...
- DBLPDBLPDBLP is a computer science bibliography website hosted at Universität Trier, in Germany. It was originally a database and logic programming bibliography site, and has existed at least since the 1980s. DBLP listed more than 1.3 million articles on computer science in January 2010...
(Digital Bibliography & Library Project) - CiteSeerXCiteSeerXCiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library and repository for scientific and academic papers with a focus on computer and information science. It is loosely based on the previous CiteSeer search engine and digital library and is built with a new open source infrastructure, SeerSuite,...
- Google Scholar
- List of academic databases and search engines
- ScirusScirusScirus is a comprehensive science-specific search engine. Like CiteSeerX and Google Scholar, it is focused on scientific information. Unlike CiteSeerX, Scirus is not only for computer sciences and IT and not all of the results include full text. It also sends its scientific search results to...