Search Briefs
+ Microsoft Launches Academic Search Beta
Quick notes on this beta release. Like all things search, it's going to be some time before we know just what type of service this will really be. That said, competition is most often a good thing for the searcher. :-)
1) Academic Live contains material direct from publishers (how much of each journal in the database is available via the service is unknown) coupled with some material from OAI-compliant repositories. What are the plans for articles that are available via a publisher and on the open web. Will preprints, uncorrected versions, etc. be marked? UPDATE: Good news, we've noticed that some articles are clearly marked as "published version."
2) Kudos to MS for providing a journal list (GS doesn't offer one and we've asked several times). However, for a journal list to be really useful we need to know more than the title. What issues/volumes of the publication are in the index?
3) No information about how often the database is updated. Hourly? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
4) Preview pane to view abstracts on results page. Good idea. Saves clicks and user time.
4) At launch MS Academic Search ONLY contains material in three disciplines:
Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics.
Note: If you've never visited Citeseer from Penn. State University it's more than worth a look. It also offers access to "academic" content in computer science, telecom, info tech, and related areas. Citeseer has been online for about seven years. In fact, Academic Live documentation mentions that Citeseer content is included in the database. One big difference, Citeseer offers citation searching and Academic Live doesn't at the present time. The service also offers acknowledgment searching, Academic Live does not. Citeseer also offers many other features (document conversion, caching, direct links to the author's home page. Btw, business research types will also want to take a look at SMEALSearch from the Citeseer team. For more about both Citeseer and SMEALSearch, take a look at the home page and writing of an info retrieval guru and a ResourceShelf info hero, Dr. Lee Giles at Penn St.
5) Microsoft says they're "not ready" to offer a "detailed timeline" when content from other disciplines will be available. OK, that's fine but how about a rough outline? When can we look for something new? Will new content be added during this version of the beta?
6) Material from OAI-compliant repositories will be included. At launch, material from ArXiv.org is in the database.
7) Fast Facts and Questions:
+ No advertising on results pages. Will content from the MS Live Book Search be included in the database in future releases?
+ Open URL is available via vendors. "In a subsequent release, we will add in the functionality for the user to choose his/her affiliation from a list of institutions."
+ No advanced search functionality in this release; however, results pages allow the user to sort results (via a pull-down), "by author of paper, journal, conference, date published or releance [sic]."
+ Get article info by hovering over title on a results page.
+ Keyword-based RSS feeds available. Good idea. Question. What will trigger a new article? Your keywords and those words in the Title? Author Field? Abstract? Full-Text? NOTE: As of Wed. morning it appears that this feature isn't working. When we've clicked the "add to Live.com" no Academic results are visible. Btw, can a feed be exported into any RSS reader?
8) From SearchDay, "The beta service is available in English versions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia. Additional markets, and content in additional subject areas, will be added throughout the beta period."
8) From the FAQ for Librarians, "which, in turn, will increase your libraries' value to your members." Excellent point but come on, Microsoft. If you're going to write a document for the librarian how about using terminology that librarians use. While it's true that some libraries offer memberships, we've rarely heard of library patrons/users/remote users/visitors referred to a members.
9) Confusing? We've seen several articles quoting MS officials saying that material comes only from free and fee-based peer-reviewed journals. Note this banner from a results page (are we interpreting it incorrectly)? However, documentation also points out (see the home page) that material also comes from repositories like ArXiv.org with more repositories on the way. For example, note the citation in this screen cap. It doesn't list a journal and the article itself sits on a server at San Jose State. It's also not a peer-reviewed article. We have NO problem at all with this type of content being included, but MS needs to be clearer about what is and is not available. Also confusing is that many articles are not available without a site license or fee. Articles in this category should have a notation that only the abstract is available for free.
10) We ran a search for the term Ethernet and then sorted to see "Conference" results. However, many of the results we reviewed were not from conference proceedings.
11) Microsoft Research Asia is doing work dynamically clustering web results. We would like to see how this technology would work with Academic Search. Potentially useful. Demo MSR clustering.
More commentary here.
Thoughts about 'sliders,' the citation-importing feature (cool), and citation searching in this release. ResourceShelf contributing editor, Steven Cohen, shares his thoughts here.
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