Microsoft has entered the academic search field, launching this month a
beta version of a tool called Windows Live Academic Search, which will
index peer-reviewed subscription content from different publishers.
"The new tool "is a bona fide competitor to Google scholar," said Dean
Giustini, a Biomedical Branch Librarian at the University of British
Columbia .
Free to use, the Microsoft product is targeted to scientists and
academic researchers wanting to find scholarly literature across broad
areas of research. It's currently available only in English, and only in
certain countries, including the US, UK, and Germany.
The searches will cover content from a range of publishers, including
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Blackwell
Publishing, Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, the British Library, and
John Wiley & Sons Inc. " At least initially, Microsoft,
which partnered with the industry association CrossRef, is not using
citation count as a factor in determining relevance.
A spokesman claimed that the Windows program offers better sorting
options than Google Scholar, allowing users to sort the search results
by author, date of publication, conference in which the paper was
presented, and the journal in which it was published. Academic Search
also offers a feature that allows users to automatically derive
citations to a paper that appears on the search results page.