Author feature of Microsoft Academic Search

[angelicawong]

Recently I ran across http://academic.research.microsoft.com/" and found some interesting and valuable features.

Especially it has some useful tools that may help you in writing papers, choosing conferences or journals to submit articles,
getting to know scholar’s ranking and co-author relationship, etc..

This topic is limited to cover the author features only, okay let’s see…

Author ranking
In http://academic.research.microsoft.com/" homepage, by clicking the Authors tab, popular authors overall/in certain domain show up.
Such guideline provides shortcut for us to update the most popular/active authors in a specific field.
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/frequentPaperAuthor_201003.jpg

We can also get a list of top-ranked authors among the 23 domains in Computer Science (seems they’re currently working more focused on this field).
It significantly improves my search efficiency by narrowing down the search results,
and helps me to find out the most influential researchers to whom I can refer in my interested domain.
It also has filters for last 10 years and last 5 years range, so that you can see who are the emerging influential scholars in recent years.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/year_filter_201003.jpg


Author detail page & Visual Explorer

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/detail.jpg

For me here’s the most exciting part. :!)
Each of the author is dedicated a profile page, and besides some basic information like research interests, homepage link and publication/citation trend,
Microsoft Academic Search has developed a tool called Visual Explorer, through which we can directly overview a scholar’s co-author network.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/visualexplorer.jpg

In the graph each node represents an author;
and the more publication one has, the bigger his/her node is.
When clicking the “detail” button the co-author’s detail information shows up;
while clicking the linking line between two authors, we can see top papers written by them. For me it’s amazing because following this network,
I can easily reach a number of most relevant researchers and expand my knowledge in my interested domain.

That’s it and hope you find it helpful. 
Have fun with it, and any other tips, please share!

 

[vacuum]

Thank you for sharing this valuable resource with us. As a fellow scientist, I am always looking for tools that can help me with my research and writing process. After exploring the website, I can see how it can be a useful tool for authors in various ways.

The author ranking feature is particularly interesting to me. It can save a lot of time and effort in finding the most influential authors in a specific field. I also appreciate the filters for the last 10 and 5 years, as it can help us identify emerging scholars in our field.

The author detail page and Visual Explorer tool are also impressive. Being able to visualize an author's co-author network can give us a better understanding of their collaborations and help us make connections with other relevant researchers.

I will definitely be using this website in my future research and writing projects. Thank you again for sharing and I look forward to more tips and resources from fellow scientists in this forum.