Happy New Year!
It’s a new year and a great time for goal setting and reflection. Over the past year we have worked very hard to make improvements to our user experience. Some of the focus areas were new experiments in our search technology, added user productivity features like Reading Lists and a renewed focus on improving pain points that you, our customers have brought to our attention. Over the next few months we will continue working on these efforts and bring new experiences and insights to the website. Some areas of focus will be entity detail pages (like our Paper, Author, Journal, Institution, Topic and Conference pages) and our analytics pages. We are excited to introduce these new features showing the power of the Microsoft Academic Graph and will let you know when they arrive.
The holidays can be a slow time for us humans but not so for our diligent AI agents in the cloud! As described in our recent journal article (opens in new tab), we recompute the topic hierarchy every 6 months and a new version was published during the holiday season. As you have probably seen, the topic collection has grown another 10%, reaching more than 700 thousand in total. As topic entities are an entity type that connects to all others, the impact of the hierarchy update can be seen everywhere on the Microsoft Academic website. We would like to thank many of you who have given us feedback. Please keep your comments coming through the feedback button and rest assured that we will continue to work on improvements to the Microsoft Academic website that we hope you find useful.
Entity Analytics Pages
If we haven’t said it enough before, I’ll repeat it here: We love to share our data (opens in new tab) and we believe very deeply in the transparency of our data. To help our users understand from a high level the data in our graph, we have created a set of pages for each entity type. These pages show the distribution of publication (opens in new tab) types, how our topics (opens in new tab) are structured and how Authors (opens in new tab), Institutions (opens in new tab), Journals (opens in new tab) and Conferences (opens in new tab) are ranked in our graph.
One feature on each of these pages allows users the ability to see rankings and information based on a specific topic. On the Author analytics page, you can see the number of authors over time and the top 100 authors for a given topic. We also show the top “trending” authors for a given topic based on citation growth over the past 5 years. This experience is driven by a control on the page that we call the Topic Browser.
Topic Browser Search
In our graph we currently have over 700K Topics and these topics are hierarchical in nature. Our Topic Browser control is designed to help you navigate and understand this hierarchy, as well as help you find entity statistics for the particular entity type that you care about. For instance, the top 100 authors in the topic “Artificial Intelligence”.
To improve this experience, we have updated the Topic Browser control to give users the ability to search the entire topic hierarchy to find the topic they are interested in. Once the user finds and selects their topic, we give the user a view of its’ parent and child topics as well:
The new design of our topic browser allows you to search all topics in our graph.
This gives our users an idea of where they are in the topic hierarchy and allows users to easily broaden or fine tune the statistics they are looking for.
Reading Lists
As we talked about in our previous blog post, our Reading List feature allows logged in users the ability to save lists of publications for later reading. We have recently improved this experience by letting users add publications to multiple Reading Lists at once and / or create a new Reading list.
You can now save a publication to multiple lists at once.
Accessibility
We put in a large effort over the past few weeks to improve the accessibility of our web site as well. While our work here is not yet complete, it is our hope that our web site is accessible to all our users. Over the next few months we will continue this effort as well.
The feature updates described in this post are available right now on Microsoft Academic (opens in new tab). We hope that they help you find the information you are looking for. We have a lot of exciting work already planned this year, but if there is a feature you would like to see or have feedback on the site, please contact us through the feedback feature.