The new year ushers in a brand new homepage for Microsoft Academic (opens in new tab), as a sign of exciting developments to come.
While we work continuously to improve the site for you, many improvements, such as graph updates or performance gains, are not visual in nature and thus harder to notice than a new homepage.
We released the new homepage to let you, our users, know that we are working on a major redesign of the entire site. The current grayscale color scheme references wireframes, to symbolize the transition – not only into the new year, but also to a fresh look further down the road.
As Microsoft Academic has progressed from a research prototype to a site enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of users around the world, it is time to take a closer look at its infrastructure. With the planned site redesign, we aim for major performance improvements. We also plan to highlight the analytic insights afforded by our academic knowledge graph. The homepage will always show the current size of the graph, to keep you informed and confident about Microsoft Academic’s coverage.
In the future, you will have access to powerful analytic insights about each entity type. The entire site will benefit from a new look that will continue enabling you find research publications, while also supporting sense-making about research topics, institutions, authors, venues, etc.
The new homepage features sample queries that will help you with ideas for how to formulate queries so you can unleash the full power of semantic search. For example, typing “Microsoft (opens in new tab)” in Microsoft Academic is automatically understood as the intention to find papers published by authors affiliated with this institution. A combination of words such as Tim Berners-Lee and semantic web is intelligently recognized as the intent to find papers authored by Sir Berners-Lee on the topic of semantic web. Try this query for yourself and see the rich information on the search results page: Tim Berners-Lee semantic web (opens in new tab)
Finally, at the bottom of the page you can find blog feeds from us, Microsoft Academic, and from our parent institution, Microsoft Research. We hope they will help us stay in touch and enable you to enjoy peeks at our latest work.
We hope you enjoy the new home page, and we look forward to surprising you with bigger and better things in this new year.
As always, we would like to hear from you either through the feedback link at the bottom right of the website (opens in new tab), or on Twitter (opens in new tab). You can also find our project home page with this blog on the Microsoft Research site at aka.ms/msracad (opens in new tab).
Happy researching!