This blog has not been update for a pretty long time..... Sorry, am really a lasy boy to update. So this is my new post in 2006.
Microsoft Academic Search has been made online (still beta). Sure, this is a powerful competitor to Google Scholar. Google Sholar is a good tool for searching academic articles. However, you find it not convenient to find bibliographic information using Google Scholar, at least for myself. Every time I located an article in Google Scholar, probably I need to compile the bibliographic information myself after following the link and reading the article.
But for Academic Search, it is unbelievable easy. After executing a query, the results will be shown after a few seconds. The results are shown in a double column view. The articles found are listed in the left column. After clicking any article in the left column, the Abstract of this article will be shown in the right column. Cool. So you don't really need follow the list and read to paper. Just read the abstract, read it only if the abstract is attracting.....
More than just providing the abstract, Academic Search can also provide a BibTeX and Endnote version of the bibliographic information. It is better than Google Scholar at this point.
However, there is still space for Academic Search to improve. For example, as shown in the results page, currently Academic Search only searches articles published in peer-reviewed journal. So Academic Search may miss some articles which are published in top conferences. And if you click one of the result, you will be llinked to the source of the article (like ACM DL or Elsevier), instead of the article directly. But in Google Scholar, you will be directed to the article directly if you have subscribed to the journal already or the article is freely-accessible.
Filed in: research
