One of the biggest changes in “academic” research in the past ten years has been the increasing importance of making publications visible and available online. There are several dimensions to this — online journals, preprint servers, self publishing, blogging, etc. An important one is the increasingly comprehensive research article search services like CiteSeer, Google Scholar and now Windows Live Academic. Microsoft announced and release a beta version of Live Academic Search that is intended to “help students, researchers and university faculty conduct research across a spectrum of academic journals.”

These services make it easy to find articles on a topic or by an author, count citations and get a sense of a paper’s impact. CiteSeer was the pioneer in providing free access to a automatically maintained scientific literature digital library. It was developed by researchers at the NEC Research Institute and is currently hosted at Penn State. Google Scholar, introduced in 2005, provides a similar service but with notable differences, including a paper ranking system based on the number of citations and the ability for publishers to push metadata to the service in addition to relying on web crawlers to find documents and extract the metadata.

Microsoft’s service has some nice features but is missing some offered by CiteSeer and Google Scholar. Interesting features to note are:

• The papers are currently drawn from metadata provided by publishers of 4300 journals and 2000 conferences covering Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Physics.
• Query results can be grouped and sort by author, source, and date rather and ranked by relevance or date. The details of the relevance ranking are not described, but it is not based on citation count.
• A Sidebar previews information about the paper when you hover over one of the query results.
• Citation text for papers is generated in two forms: BibTex and EndNote.
• Like Google Scholar, Live Academic Search indexes library-subscribed content and supports the OpenURL for linking to subscription-based content.
• It’s not yet doing a native citation count, but importing values from CiteSeer.

Competition is usually good and in this case I think researchers and students will definitely benefit if Google and MSN compete to provide the best search service for academic articles. Even in its current beta form, Microsoft Live Academic looks very useful on its own.

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