Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research, which also serves as a test-bed for many research ideas in Data Mining, Named Entity Extraction and Disambiguation, Data Visualization, etc. As a research prototype, the coverage of MAS is still very limited in certain domains. We appreciate your feedback and contribution.
Microsoft Academic Search provides many innovative ways to explore academic publications, authors, conferences, journals, organizations and keywords, connecting millions of scholars, students, librarians, and other users.
Please follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/msftacademic or join our Forum, your feedback will allow us to continue to improve our service.
How to search with Microsoft Academic Search
To realize a basic search, simply enter your keyword(s) and click on the search button.
Microsoft Academic Search is expanding its coverage to more domains than Computer Science only, which could assist users to find specified publications by multi-domain search. Click here to find out how many domains we have covered at present.
Example: Enter your keyword(s); click ‘All Domains’ button; select a check box from the drop-down list to narrow your search to a specified domain.
If you have more specific search terms, you may want to use Advanced Search to increase the accuracy and effectiveness. Click on "Advanced Search" and specify the values in any of these fields: Author, Conference, Journal and Year.
Example: To find "data mining" related publications published after 1999, enter the keywords and set the publication year limit:
You could also perform advanced searches in normal search field with structured queries. You may refer to the Structured Query Language as follows:
<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>+ ')'
Example: To search for publications containing "object level" in title and published after 2004, enter: "title:(object level) year>=2004"
Contribute to Microsoft Academic Search
Microsoft Academic Search is open for our users to edit the content. If you find any wrong or out-of-date information about author profile, publication profile or author publication list, you can make corrections or updates directly online.
For example, you may correct an author’s basic information such as names, organization, photo, or homepage. The publication list is open for users to modify as well. You can update publication information, upload PDF and BibTex, even confirm and remove publications.
Your request will appear online after verification. For any correction that is not supported by the current editing tool, please do inform us. We appreciate your contributions to help build an Academic Search with the most accurate and fresh information.
Get the latest Call for Papers
You may want to keep yourself informed of the submission deadlines of a conference, or check the location and dates of the event. The Call for Papers feature could be a helpful tool for you.
The CFP page automatically shows you a latest half year conference list, otherwise you can find your target conferences via ‘Filter by Domain’. Hovering mouse on a single timeline at the upper page enables you to figure out the important dates of each conference. Clicking the ‘map view’ tab helps to get the overview of conference locations easily.
If you are certain of which conference you're looking for, simply enter your search term in the search box. Both full name and acronym are acceptable in Academic Search.
Currently, Call for Papers feature is only available in Computer Science domain.
Explore scholars' cooperating network
The Visual Explorer page presents the academic relationship among scholars, which provides you great facility to expand your original searches and approach more valuable and relevant resources.
On the Co-author Graph UI, each node represents an author, and a bigger node means the author has more publications. You can browse an author's information by clicking the tooltips. The more publications two authors write together, the closer their nodes are positioned. You may check the top publications written by two authors by clicking the line that links them. Want to see more co-written publications? Click "view more". You can also copy the URL to share the graph with others.
The Co-author Path helps you to discover the relationship path between two scholars. The name of each side can be changed in order to perform different searches. You can easily embed these graphs to your homepage.
The Author Citation Graph presents the citation relationship among scholars. On the UI, each node represents an author. Mouse over any of the nodes then clicking the tooltips will get the basic information about the author. The author who is positioned at the top-left corner of the page is considered as the main author at the current page. As for other authors, the more his/her publications cite the publications of the main author, the closer their nodes are to the main author.
The Genealogy Graph displays the advisor and advisee relationships among researchers. The central node corresponds to the current author while the nodes on top of him represent his advisors and the nodes below him represent his advisees. If a particular author has many advisees, the graph groups them accordingly to their current organization. Furthermore, the edge to the current author is shorter if the two authors have a large number of co-publications.
Embedding publications in your own web page
Microsoft Academic Search allows users to embed publication lists in web pages that are hosted elsewhere, such as your homepage.
How you can do this: Click the embed button at the upper right corner of the author detail page, then click the Generate JavaScript code button. Make sure to copy the entire JavaScript code shown in the right window and paste it on your web page.
View paper referencing information
The Citation Context section automatically extracts and lists sections where other papers talk about a given paper, to help users easily and quickly understand how others have commented on that paper.
You can find the citation context section on the publication detail page. A typical result includes: Snippet – an actual excerpt from the citation - the cited paper will appear in bold; Source - right below the snippet, you can see the first author and title of the citation, click the title to reach this paper. If you would like to view more, just click the “Citation Context” label to expand.
Visualize publication trends of academic domains
The Domain Trend page analyzes research trends of academic domains/sub domains and visualizes it using a stacked area chart. It provides you with a clear view of how publications changed over time for each domain/sub domain. You can also get a list of top authors during a selected time period.
By default all 15 pre-defined top domains will be shown on the chart. You can customize which domains are shown using the filter panel on the right. On the Y Axis of the chart, you can choose whether count (raw publications count) or percentage (relative to total publications of selected sub domains) is plotted. Along the X Axis, we provide a time range selection UI for you to specify a time period. To choose a domain, you can either click on the corresponding area on the chart, or select it from the domain list. The top authors of this domain will be listed below accordingly, based on citations during the specified time period. You can also click the “More” button to find additional authors.
Get more information about authors’ institutions.
Microsoft Academic Search has introduced two new features providing more information about the organizations authors work at.
A. Academic Map
Academic Map allows you to quickly sift through organizations by their geographic location and size. Organizations are displayed as dots on a map with their color and size related to their number of authors. Clicking on an organization displays further detail about its authors. You can also filter the displayed organizations and authors by domain with the organizations automatically resizing based on their number of authors in that particular domain.
B. Organization Comparison
You can now click the compare button on an organization detail page to compare that organization with others. The differences between the two organizations will be shown as below. A scatterplot displays the trends in number of publications and citations of the two organizations. In the middle part of the page, it shows the differences between the keywords related to the organizations’ research priorities and research interests. Words related to only one organization are displayed in blue whereas words relating to both are orange. You can also compare the authors of each organization by looking at their respective author lists.
Search Results Page
In general, Microsoft Academic Search returns you a list of results based on your search terms. Further, the search results can be narrowed down to a specific domain.
Example: The search "data mining" returns you a page as follows:
A: Year Filter – To further filter the results by specifying year conditions.
B: Results – Search results are listed here. Each item contains the following information:
- Publication title – Link to the publication detail page that shows its author information, abstract, reference list, citation list, etc.
- View publication – Link to view the publication.
- Citations – The number of the publications that have cited this publication, and link to the full list of these publications.
- Author name(s) – Link to the author detail page that shows his/her homepage, affiliation, address, publication list, etc.
- Publication abstract
- Published date
- Publication source – Link to the conference/journal page that shows its publication count, citation count, publication year range, publication list, etc.
C: Sidebar – By switching among the categories, you can quickly narrow the results to specified domain.
Object Detail Page
In the case that we have an exactly matching entity to your query, Academic Search will automatically return you an object detail page. An object detail page is a profile page dedicated to a publication, author, organization, conference, journal, or keyword.
You can also get an object detail page by clicking a publication title, author name, organization name, conference name, journal title, or keyword on any page of Microsoft Academic Search.
Example: Here is a detail page for the author Wei-Ying Ma:
Verified Author
The authors in our system are divided into two types: verified authors and unverified ones. Where icons are shown with a question mark, it indicates that the authors have not had their profiles edited by any users. Updates and suggestions from users are welcomed. All other authors have had his/her basic information verified, further updates for these authors need to be done cautiously.
How do I make my profile verified?
Click the “Edit” button next to the author profile, sign in to the ‘User Input’ center with a Live ID, you can confirm the spelling of your name, and to enter your native name, homepage, affiliation, photo URL, etc. Please keep in mind that it may take several days to see the updates online, we appreciate your patience.
H-index
The h-index is proposed by Jorge E. Hirsch to measure the productivity and impact of a researcher. Hirsch defined this index as, if a researcher has h-index, h of his papers will be cited at least h times for each while the other papers of him received at most h citations for each.
The h-index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of an organization. We calculate the index based on the set of papers which consists of (a) ever written by currently affiliated authors, and (b) written by authors who were once affiliated with the organization as indicated by the meta data extracted from papers. If an organization has h-index, h of papers in this set will be cited at least h times for each while the other papers received at most h citations for each.
G-index
The g-index is another method to evaluate a researcher, which is based on the distribution of a researcher's citations. This index is suggested by Leo Egghe as, if a researcher has g-index g, g of his most cited papers has g citations on average and g is the largest possible number.
Domain Rank Lists
Microsoft Academic Search generates rank lists for multiple domains. You may use the directory to discover influential publications, authors, conferences, journals and organizations. You may further modify the year filter to find out key new scholars.
Learn more about our ranking mechanism.
Microsoft Academic Search provides APIs to allow you to build compelling tools and experiences on top of the rich data. Whether you want to build your own ranking of institutions or build visual explorer for browsing academic papers in Genetics, we believe the APIs make it easy for you to start that project.
We will continue to improve the APIs and we look forward to closely working with you – the community – to make sure the APIs do deliver the reliable, high-quality results so that you can focus on your apps and services.
For more information about the API, please refer to API introduction page.
Microsoft Academic Search collaborates intensively with researchers and institutions within and outside Microsoft Research.
Internal collaborations
MAS serves as a test bed for research ideas and experiments, here are some examples:
- Object-Level Search, Author Integration & Name Disambiguation, Edit Publication List collaboration with Web Search and Mining group.
- 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, 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).
- Domain Trend, Academic Map and Call for Papers collaboration with Software Analytics group.
- Paper Citation Graph collaboration with Internet Graphics group.
- Academic Search WP7 client collaboration with MSR researcher Christian Bird and Tom Zimmermann.
Features in December 2011 release
- Now every domain has sub domains, it is easier to discover influential publications, researchers, journals, conferences and organizations in these areas, e.g. Social Science.
- New feature - Genealogy Graph displays advisor - advisee relationships among researchers based on the information mined from the web and user input.
- New visualization tool - Paper Citation Graph shows the citation relationships among papers, helping users to explore the relationships among publications.
Features in September 2011 release
- 8 domains have been added.
- The number of publications increases to 35.3 million, and the number of authors increases to 18.9 million.
- Compare Organizations feature has been enhanced. It now allows users to compare all the information in different domains and different year ranges.
- More ranking options have been added in author rank list pages and organization rank list pages.
- RefWorks tagged format has been added in the Export feature, and users can export all of one author’s publications at a time.
- External API has been enhanced by allowing API users to get data in table format.
- A new version of WP7 client was released.
Features in June 2011 release
- 9 domains have been added and publication coverage will be expanding to 14 domains in all over the next several weeks. The number of publications and authors is now 27.1 million and 16.2 million respectively.
- A new tool called Academic Map has been added. It allows users to explore organizations geographically and by size.
- Users can now compare differences in the number of publications and citations as well as research priorities and interests between two organizations using the new Compare Organizations feature.
- Keyword detail pages have been enhanced with the new Stemming Variations and Definition Context features.
- All past changes to the author/paper are listed in reverse-chronological order, users can view history by clicking the “View History” tab in the user contribution center.
Features in March 2011 release
- Publication coverage is expanding to more domains than just computer science; the number of publications and authors is now 15.7 million and 11.1 million.
- Keyword detail page is newly added to help users explore technical trends, find experts, and etc. With keyword object introduced, users can learn about research interests of an author, a conference, a journal, or an organization, more easily.
- Interactive tool gives users the ability to easily update their information. With this tool users can quickly add or remove papers from their profile. The system learns from user inputs and makes additional suggestions to the users.
- Academic Search API is at testing stage, which extends the platform and allows developers to build compelling apps and services on top of Academic Search. For example, the APIs can be used to extract data from Academic Search, and calculate your own ranking system.
- The user experience of Call for Papers is enhanced by:
-
- Timeline view providing users a better way to figure out important dates of the upcoming conferences of interests.
- Getting a better overview of conference locations on a map.
- Presently, users are encouraged to post comments on our websites by integrating with social channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
- Improve UI with bug fixes and new features like author citation graph to provide a vivid citation relationship among scholars, auto complete for search box, BibTex exporting.
Features in December 2010 release
- Newly added "Citation Context" section automatically extracts and lists the sections where other papers talk about a given paper, to help users quickly and easily understand how people have commented on that paper.
- Domain trends are visualized by a stacked graph that shows the number/percentage of publications in each sub domain we have defined in computer science.
- Name disambiguation improvement:
-
- Distinguish between edited authors (shown with authors’ photos) and un-edited authors (shown with question mark); we welcome you to help correct/add some metadata, for example, authors’ homepages and organizations.
- In the “User Input” functions, individual users can maintain their own publication list by confirming they are indeed the author of the listed papers.
- The data update process is even faster and smoother; Microsoft Academic Search is updated based on user submissions and crawlers twice a week.
- The number of publications and authors is now 7.6 million and 9.7 million.
Features in September 2010 release
- Homepage shows 6 categories: Publication, Author, Conference, Journal, Organization and Domain, making it easier for users to check the popular items in each category.
- Now users can see lists of organizations by continents, also the H-Index for an organization for better measurement of its contribution.
- User can see the path between two authors by co-author relationship.
- Enhanced user feedback feature enables users to manage their publication list, add papers by uploading PDF links or simply a BibTeX file.
- Users can share most pages to Facebook and Twitter communities.
- The number of publications is now 7.0 million.
Features in July 2010 release
- Data quality has been significantly improved with our new PDF extractor.
- Newly add Organization Detail Page:
- Each organization now has a detail profile page with total publication/citation counts, homepage link and all its affiliated authors listed.
- Organization ranking is newly introduced.
- Enhanced User Input functions:
-
- Users are now able to edit the publication list by adding papers in PDF format, which facilitates the process for authors to manage their paper list.
- Users are allowed to add or delete authors, as well as altering order of authors.
- Name suggestions for author related query.
- Call for Paper Calendar UI is simplified for better user experience.
- Other UI improvements:
- A navigation bar is added in each search/result page, with home button and links to previous pages.
- The number of publications is now 6.0 million.
Features in May 2010 release
- Provide a direct approach to the object detail page. Academic Search returns you directly to an object detail page if your query has an exactly matching entity in our database.
- The Call for Papers Calendar reminds you the paper submission deadlines for the conferences you are interested in.
- Add user edit function enables you to make corrections or updates to the content directly online.
- Refine the UI:
- Conference/journal trend graph is added to conference/journal's object detail page. The left sidebar in search results page makes the search process quick and precise; users can categorize search results by author, publication, conference and journal in the result page.
- The number of publications is now 5.7 million.
Features in March 2010 release
- Add new features on author detail page, such as: author's research interests, embed the publication list in other web pages, follow the author's updates.
- Improve Visual Explorer, so that users can search for other authors in Visual Explorer, or click the "Details" button to see author's information.
- Provide daily update of popular papers/authors on the homepage.
- Refine search results by adding year filter.
- Enhance author name suggestions which helps users quickly approach what they're looking for.
- The number of publications is now 5.2 million.
Features in December 2009 release
- Increase the coverage and freshness of paper collection: thousands of new papers are integrated into our database weekly, summing up to more than 4 million in total; the quality of paper download links is improved.
- Generate richer author information, such as: the H/G index of an author; citation/ publication trend graph which shows author's long term impact; more than 15,000 authors have photos added to their profile.
- Enhance user experience with bug fixes and new features like: query suggestion; "Advanced Search" to help users quickly find the information they are looking for.
- The number of publications is now 4.5 million.
Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state of the art. Microsoft Research has expanded over the years to eight locations worldwide and a number of collaborative projects that bring together the best minds in computer science to advance a research agenda based on their unique talents and interests.
Other websites from Microsoft Research:
Microsoft Research | Engkoo(英库) | Renlifang(人立方) | Travel Guide(旅游指南) | Couplet(对联)