Comparison of Academic Search Engines(Summary)

Google Scholar

• Base features
  • Publication search
    • Most complete database for papers (even books)
    • Support custom search (by date, articles/patents, conferences/journals, research area, etc.)
    • Support related articles search
    • Rapid and precise algorithm for ranking & re-ranking the searching result.
• Special features
  •  Library Search
    • Provide direct-link to the holding information page of your organization(like Tsinghua library or British Library, maybe base on your IP or your browser language)
• User experience
  • UI is simple but intuitive. Many results are immediately downloadable, gain bonus point from the library search.
• Summary
  • Google scholar attempts to be the best tool for searching publications, not much features, but everyone is useful.

Microsoft Academic Search (MSAS)

• Base features

•  
  • Author search
    • Publication/citation trend graph
    • Provide some personal information/publication list which is useful.
  • Publication search
    • Incomplete database, perhaps.
    • Support custom search with less features than Google Scholar.
    • Different ranking algorithm to Google Scholar, however, both kind of make sense.
  • Conference search
  • Journal search
  • Organization search

• Special features

• 
  
  • Domain classifying & Domain trend
    • Visualize the publication trend of subdomains in computer science. Also give an expert ranking for each domain.
  • Co-author graph
    • A fancy visualization tool to show the relationships between authors. It can also discover the co-author paths from one to another within a short time.
    • Not drive with javascript or flash but Microsoft silverlight. It needs user to install extra plug-in.
  • CFP (Call for Papers)
    • A calendar to show the paper submissions due, coming conferences, journals, etc.

• User experience

•  
  • Fancy interface, lots of visualization leads very nice user experience, however some functions are slow.
  • Compare with other academic search engines, MS Academic Search provide more features, which some are useful.
  • Less results of publication search than Google scholar, less downloadable too.

• Summary

•  
  • MS Academic Search focus on not only the publication searching, but also the author relation searching. It maintains a big database which including authors, publications, conferences… and the relationships between them. Thus, it is a better academic tool if our purpose is not just searching one paper.

ArnetMiner

• Base features
  • Publication search
    • Incomplete database.
    • Ranking algorithm is not so well done.
  • Expertise search
    • Instead of publications, ArnetMiner emphasize on people. It provides lots of information for the researchers, notably social graphs and ability radar charts. It also gives a graph to show the relationship between one and other people, though some of them are wrong.
  • Social Graph
    • This feature is during development, and similar to Co-author graph in MSAS.
  • Conference search
• Special features
  • Topic browser
    • Similar to “Domain classifying” in Microsoft Academic Search, but Arnetminer retains 199 topics (which MSAS has less than 30 domains), and classify both experts and conferences.
    • Provide an events calendar, even through the information is overdue.
  • Course search
    • Nice feature for undergraduate student which searching for a course or a teacher.
  • Ranks
    • Arnetminer calculate scores about abilities for each experts by some formula (shown at http://arnetminer.org/AcademicStatistics ), rank all experts according these formula (for example Longevity or Sociability).
• User experience
  • Some feature is not so intuitive. Many help document make people confused.
  • Could not find “search paper” button from the home page.
• Summary
  • Arnetminer served by Tsinghua KEG team, which is under testing, and consists of many interesting features. Through it has many problems or bugs, but it focus on selling some ideas such like “what an academic search engine can do?” Beside, it is a good web-site for the undergraduate student to boost up.

BiomedExperts

• Exactly, BiomendExperts is not a search engine but a social network with many, many register users.
• The interface looks very fancy & cool.
• Result of search page and the visualization tool are make sense due to the reasonable datasets.