What is Microsoft Academic Search?

Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia, and also serves as a test-bed for our object-level vertical search research. Microsoft Academic Search provides many innovative ways to explore scientific papers, conferences, journals, and authors, connecting millions of scholars, students, librarians, and other users together.

How are the results ranked?

Objects in a search result are sorted based on two factors: their relevance to the query and their global importance. The relevance score of an object is computed by its attributes; the importance score of an object is calculated by its relationships with other objects.

Technologies behind Microsoft Academic Search:

• Object-Level Ranking: Bringing Order to Web Objects
  Zaiqing Nie, Yuanzhi Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen, and Wei-Ying Ma
  In the Proceedings of the 14th international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2005), May 10-14, 2005, in Chiba, Japan.
• Object-Level Vertical Search
  Zaiqing Nie, Yuanzhi Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen, and Wei-Ying Ma
  In the Third Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2007,May 10-14, research paper).
• Extracting Objects from the Web
  Zaiqing Nie, Fei Wu, Ji-Rong Wen, Wei-Ying Ma
  In the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006,poster paper ).

• Simultaneous Record Detection and Attribute Labeling in Web Data Extraction

  Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma

  In the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD 2006, full paper).

• 2D Conditional Random Fields for Web Information Extraction

  Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma

  In the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2005).

• Web Object Retrieval

  Zaiqing Nie, Yunxiao Ma, Shuming Shi, Ji-Rong Wen, Wei-Ying Ma

  In the Proceedings of the 16th international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2007).

What’s new in the December 2009 release:

In this release, we have the following major enhancements:

• Increase the coverage and freshness of the paper collection

  We have collected more than 3 million papers, and thousands of new papers are added every week. We have also improved the quality of the paper download links.

  

• Provide more accurate information

  We have improved our data process pipeline and back-end editing tool so that we can quickly identify and fix inaccurate information.

• Generating richer author information, such as:

  a.        The h/g index of an author

             H-index: an author has index h if he/she has published h papers each of which has been cited by others at least h times.

             G-index: the (unique) largest number such that the top g papers published by the author received (together) at least (g*g) citations.

  b.        The paper/citation trend graph to show the impact of an author over time.

  

  c.        Added photos to more than 15,000 author profiles

• Enhanced the user experience with bug fixes and new features including:

  a.        Query Suggestions

  b.        Advanced search

Search Help:

Basic Search:

To perform a search with Microsoft Academic Search, enter your keyword(s) in the box provided and click on the search button.

These four tabs allow you to view relevant papers, authors, conferences and journals.

Advanced Search:

Advanced search enables you to search on these specific fields:

• Keywords
• Paper Title
• Author
• Conference
• Journal
• Date

For example, it is possible to create a query to search for all "data mining" related papers published after 1999.

You can also input the structured queries in the normal search field. For example, it is possible to search for all "data mining" related papers published after 1999 by entering "data mining year>=2000" into the search field.

Structured query:

We also provide a structured query language:

<query> := <tokens>+
<token> := <normal query> | <field query>
<normal query> := (array of any non-white-space character)
<field query> := <key><oper><field query value>
<key> := 'author' | 'title' | 'conf' | 'jour' | 'year'
<oper> := '>=' | '<=' | ':' | '=' | '>' | '<'
<field query value> : <normal query> | '(' <normal query>+ ')'

For example: To search papers containing "object level" in the title and published after 2000

    "title:(object level) year>=2000"

Search papers published in WWW 2008

    "conf:www year=2008"

Result Display Help:

Search Result Page:

Once you’ve entered your query, Microsoft Academic Search will return a list of results based on your keyword(s).

Example Query: Find all ranked papers with keywords "information retrieval": the results will be shown as follows:

A: Result Summary – Microsoft Academic Search shows a summary of your results, listing your query terms, the total number of results and the query cost.

B: Year Filter – Enables users to further filter your results by specifying year conditions.

C: Result –  The search results are shown here. Each result item contains the following information:

• Paper title – Link to the Paper's detail page, which shows the aggregated information of a paper including its abstract, reference list, citation list, etc
• Published date
• Citations – The number of papers that have cited this paper; link to the full list of papers
• Author name – Link to the author detail page, which shows the aggregated information of an author, including homepage, affiliation, address, publication list, etc
• Paper abstract
• Paper source – Link to the conference/journal page, which shows the aggregated information of a conference/journal, including publication count, citation count, publication year range, publication list, etc

D: Related Result Panel – The related author, conference and journal are shown.

Object Detail Page:

In addition to the search result page, Microsoft Academic Search also shows the detail information of a paper(or author, conference, journal). When a user clicks on paper title, author name, conference name, or journal name, he/she will be redirected to the object detail page. For example, here is a detailed page for the author: Wei-Ying Ma

Visual Explorer Page:

Microsoft Academic Search automatically summarizes the co-author information for each author. Through visual explorer, a user can browse the top co-authors of authors by clicking an author in the displayed graph.

Computer Science Directory Page:

Microsoft Academic Search generates webpages with ranked objects for the 23 research fields within Computer Science. Users can use this page to discover influential papers, authors, conferences, and journals within their field.

H-index:

G-index: