There are several advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Academic Search (MSAS), and they are discussed in following sections.
Firstly, here are some aspects about the strengths.
· The overall appearance of MSAS is very beautiful and attractive☺. To certain extent, this can increase users’ interest on using it. For me, when looking at this web page, I always have comfortable feelings instead of being filled with anxiety. With a vivid and colorful book on the left corner, an image of comprehensive academic content is represented. Although exterior looking is only a small aspect, it does improve MSAS’s competence in the realm of academic research. Compare to Google Scholar, difference can be easily told. Pictures reflecting this are listed below.
· Another outstanding of MSAS is that it adds in some other classifications for search, such as conference, journal, organization and domain. Actually, when search for some academic papers, people always want to focus their emphasis on certain conferences or journals. To provide users an opportunity of exact search, this improvement is effective by confining the range to search and focusing on details. Besides, under every sub-domain of the search condition, there are top ones and most viewed ones listed to tell users more information about that specified area or profession. For us, I think it may be favorable because under most circumstances, people or affairs that own the most attentions from the public are cutting edge ones. Hence, latest development or update in academics can be obtained.
· Thirdly and the most impressive characteristics of MSAS is the network of co-authors of certain scholar. From this vivid net, we can get general information about that author’s academic relationships. The distance between them is arranged via the total number of publications on which they work together. This offers users more chances and content about professions in that specified realm they are interested in. I do appreciate this when I use the MSAS to search some basic papers of one topic. Furthermore, co-authors’ relationship network can also be viewed by a simple click.
In a word, as an academic search engine whose task is to provider its users sound and exact information about academics, MSAS has its prominent features that should be kept and developed. However, in several other aspects, it still has a long way to go.
· Firstly, when I was engaged in the work of using MSAS to edit the details of USTC professors, I felt the constructed database of scholars and publications was far from sufficient and satisfying. By inputting an academic paper of certain author, published in IEEE or some international conferences. The page showed below appears at the most time.
After cumulated failures, I was so disappointed and frustrated. Therefore, I think the database of current technologies and experts must be supplemented. Otherwise, MSAS will be refused to use because of lacking abundant content. As I said before, many aspects of search conditions are listed. In my perspective, a selective combination can make the result more promising and robust. For example, in the “Advanced Search” section, a choice to associate conference with domain can be provided. Anyway, it is just one kind of possibility. Selections for users should be designed to be all-round.
· Another problem I encountered when I finished the edit part is that once I inputted a name to search, several names appear in the DropDownList. This situation of name duplicity can seriously affect the search result when users cannot tell the difference. Sometimes, it is even wrong matching of that author’s personal information and the publications. Corresponding modification on this phenomenon should be proposed to make it apparent to distinguish authors with the same name. Often, for scholars in non-English speaking countries, they have different traditions on name speaking and their names in different publications may be not the same. So it is highly possible that the paper cannot be attached to that person. For example, when I search for a scholar with his Chinese name “Li Liu” and the correct input based on English customs is “Liu Li”. The search result includes scholars with both the names (What is worse, just from the school none of the scholars is the one I’m interested in). It will influence the effectiveness of this search.
Besides, in the example described above, after I examine the page of every name, I found that the second one is the right result. That is to say, wrong matches and information are provided by MSAS, which will undoubtedly reduce its competence and popularity among users.
· Since convenience and soundness are the primary purpose an engine wants to offer, MSAS ignores to make the search readily accessible in some places, such as the sub-search part in different classifications. There are a huge number of universities in the world. When I entered the organization part and scanned the long list of organizations in Asia &Oceania, I was surprised to find that they were listed not in the alphabetic order. It took me a long time to find USTC from the list. Therefore, I think it is better and more favorable to save time to put them in a certain order which is convenient to search. Or another search engine can be added here to find organizations I want.
To sum up, MSAS has its eminent characteristics for academic search. In the meantime, it also suffers from some severe drawbacks which must be ameliorated as soon as possible.
（原文发表于CSDN博客：http://blog.csdn.net/codingcrazy/archive/2010/11/06/5991167.aspx）
