It’s been a very impressive year for Microsoft Academic Search.
Not only did the index experience major growth during the past 12 months but the Academic Research team launched a new interface and added several new tools including several that allow users to visualize data.
Today, Microsoft Academic Search launched their December update and it includes more subdomains (now available for all top-level domains) and two more interactive data visualization tools.
Here’s What’s New This Month:
1. Now every top-level domain (Science, Social Sciences, Medicine, etc.) has subdomains that can potentially make it very easy to create more precise queries. For example, the Arts and Humanities domain offers subdomains including Art History, Literature, and Philosophy. All subdomains also offer numerous lists and rankings as you can see here.
2. New Visualization Tool – Genealogy Graph
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.
3. New Visualization Tool – Paper Citation Graph
Shows the relationships among papers, helping users to explore the relationships among publications.
Some of the other interactive visualization tools include Organization Comparison, the Call for Papers Map, and the C0-Author Graph and Path. Make sure to also take a look at the cool and informative Domain Trend page (only available for computer sciences at this time).
Developers might be interested to learn that Microsoft Academic Search launched an API earlier this year.
Here are a few other Microsoft Academic Research posts from 2011 where we discuss other features and look at the future prospects for the service.
- Microsoft Academic Search (Beta) Appears Ready to Expand Database Coverage
- Microsoft Academic Search: A Major Update and Several New Features Now Available
- Google Scholar “Citations” Launches & A Look at What Microsoft Is Up To With Academic Search
- Microsoft Makes Another Major Update to Academic Search Database
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