Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

The Evolution of Academic Search

Microsoft has announced an academic search product, academic.live.com, and I’m impressed. Blending elements of Google Scholar and CiteSeer, the Live Academic search seems to address the things students want, but currently lack in Google Scholar. These include:

• Downloadable citation (Endnote and BibTex - they get major points for BibTex)
• Ability to screen the search to only open access journals.
• Ability to sort results by Relevance, Date, Author, Journal and Conference.
• Structured abstracts.

I believe a lot of students will find these features very useful. As reported on Techcrunch, Live Academic only supports the sciences, but they plan to add subject areas as development continues.

The simple fact is academic search is being decentralized from the institution. Tools like Google Scholar, CiteSeer, Live Academic and the indispensable CiteULike are giving students new options for approaching academic content. We know the woeful state of publisher-maintained databases, so is it really any surprise that the market is reacting? By creating such a strong offering, Microsoft has realized the market space available in the academic search field. In offering students a full-featured, high quality product, I feel there’s significant audience that can be taken from Google Scholar (which truly has the feel of a 20% project, as opposed to an area in which Google is significantly investing).

When professors and librarians complain that students only use the web for research, they are missing the point. Students want academic content, and a great number of students want the best academic content. But searching across 15 library databases that look and feel like they were designed in 1995 just doesn’t fit the model of search our students are comfortable with. Microsoft has seen an area of opportunity, and is giving tools to an underserved population. Google and the various LIS vendors are now playing catch-up to Microsoft.

Postscript: What decentralized (i.e. not tied to your library) services do you use for academic purposes? I talked about a few I use (Scholar, CiteULike, Citeseer), but I wonder if there are any others out there that I’m missing. I’m not really talking open archives and federated repositories, but things more along the lines of consumer tools that students could really embrace.

What do you call ‘tied to your library’?

I use Jstor quite a lot, because it has everything, but it is paying (and expensive) service–paid by my local National Research Institute. The same institute support HAL, which is an open-archive. I used to go on SSRN, which is for social sciences, and I know ArXiv is great for hard science, mostly because it has som many full texts. I remember using Amazon too, though it is not academic-oriented, it is heavily used by scholars.