7 ms·

Show HN: A new take on academic search

37 points by mhluongo 14y ago

SparrowOS 14y ago
http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-torture-of-the-highest-form/ http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur... Years of CIA interrogation and you're still in denial on Mr. God. God says... melted furnace exaltedness hurts_my_head SUCH starting-place Willing Eternity stages revolved Jesus fixed injure bewailed disalloweth glided befalls Glad stories departed fuller do_not_disturb slumin prepare all-sufficient Lo variance weak men's woman's softened knocked showing sighs renew Ireland surveyed saw nourished Jacob once_upon_a_time endures daughter-in-law Arians seventh Because boiled tune hi six Light looked growth reigning along foreshow Unless expends thing gnawed muddy won allowances Libya That's_my_favorite listening outward subjoins perfect prove forget comfort arguments director appeared Shine reports formest marking for greeted treasured miserably fake grasps Being happeneth thither urge unwholesome wove Etexts lest recognise brother acute objected extended dragons auditor complaints moveth soever ---- Don't tell me. Tell God. You're in denial. Randomly crack-open a book. God says... his daughter to wife also. 29:29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid. 29:30 And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more than Leah, and served with him yet seven other years. 29:31 And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren. 29:32 And Leah conceived, and bare a son, and she called his name Reuben: for she said, Surely the LORD hath looked upon my affliction; now therefore my husband will love me. 29:33 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the LORD hath heard I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also: and she called his name Simeon.
kanzure 14y ago
I seem to recall when Google Scholar came out that they had a set of example queries. Maybe this was another search engine that did this. Anyway, a set of sample queries with results that you're proud of would be nice to see on scholr.ly, because apparently I can't figure out how to use it. I tried some queries and the results were awful. query: author:"george church" ... I see only one publication, titled "registered trademark of AAAS. Synthetic Gene Networks That Count" which must be wrong. query: author:"george whitesides" ... again only one publication ("New Editorial Board Chair"), and a coauthor named "Dropspots Microdevice" http://scholr.ly/person/6263228/dropspots-microdevice http://scholr.ly/person/6263228/dropspots-microdevice Naturally, his affiliation is listed as "for Lab on a Chip". query: "Rapid casting of patterned vascular networks for perfusable engineered three-dimensional tissues" (the title of a recent paper) returned a few publication results, none of which were the publication in question. It was in Nature Materials, so it's not exactly obscure. query: doi:10.1038/nmat3357 ... no results found. Hmm. Well, I don't know how to use this site. Here's what I really want: * I want a public domain, reusable index of all papers everywhere. I want bibtex, xml, json, and all the other terrible formats for keeping track of those papers. * I want working Zotero translators that can properly extract metadata from all science publishing sites. And I just want this data instead of having to fish it out of a search engine. * I want to be told where I can find pdf files hosted on sites, so that I don't have to send emails begging for copies. Google Scholar does this pretty well. * Actual data about which papers cite what, instead of trusting the "cited by" links/results in Google Scholar. Also, a "this paper cites..." feature so that I don't have to bother digging out the doi numbers from the bibliography myself. * Supplementary documents are evil, but they exist and they should be immediately available next to or with any paper. Edit: * An index of which libraries at which universities are subscribed to which publishers. If anyone wants to contribute to this information, please go to your library's ezproxy service (ezproxy.lib.whoever.edu:2048/menu or sometimes on a different subdomain) and copy/paste to kanzure@gmail.com for aggregation. This is useful for understanding which universities are likely to have access to which papers. Each service listed also has either partial/incomplete subscription and very rarely full subscription, but getting a list of the exact access rights is even harder to squirrel out. Tracking down access to papers is a pain in the butt. ILL is silly and costs way too much ($0.30/query say whaaat). * I also want an academic aggregator that has the balls to go after OCLC, WorldCat, etc. I wish Bill Gates would just buy the entire scientific publishing industry, but alas! I should emphasize this OCLC alternative would be open-access. Mendeley doesn't count, I can't even get their data out. I'm definitely neglecting some other major issues..
- bioinformatics 14y ago
  Every other week we have another "scientific search" service aggregator, etc coming out that doesn't address half of what you mentioned above. Spot on your review.
- mhluongo 14y ago
  Actually- we address some of that! So we don't quite provide a Zotero data utopia (yet...), but * each paper page has PDF links and BibTeX * we extract citation data from PDFs so you can browse the citation graph immediately. We're working on stats right now, but everything we extract is publicly inspectable. * we're all about open access- in fact, we are only open access, and will do our best to contribute back to bettering academic communication. * trust me, we have the balls. Still working on the rest.
  - kanzure 14y ago
    > we extract citation data from PDFs so you can browse the > citation graph immediately Can you just.. give us the citation data instead? How is this better than ISI and other vendors? Edit: removed some other comments. That's my most important question.
    - mhluongo 14y ago
      I don't mean to be obtuse, but what would that look like? We've been focused on providing a better browsing experience with these citations, but if there's a demand for them in a different format I don't see why we wouldn't provide it.
      - kanzure 14y ago
        I imagine it would look like raw data, probably json. Then you can do the mashups play, etc. I think Elsevier has tried some of that to some success (look at their API docs). Mendeley is also trying this approach and has done fairly well so far.
        14y ago
pseut 14y ago
So, not trying to be a dick, but what does it do? Is it supposed to be a better Google Scholar? The "about" page is pretty terse and all it tells me is that your site is "lovingly crafted" which I'm sure is very wonderful, but uninformative.
- mhluongo 14y ago
  That's not "dick" at all- we need better messaging. We're a people-focused academic search engine, currently for computer science. Instead of just returning papers, we also deliver authors relevant to those papers. The idea is that there's a bunch of value in the citation and co-authorship networks that aren't exposed when results are simply flat PDFs.
  - pseut 14y ago
    Who is this aimed for? PhD students? Faculty? Businesses looking for consultants? I'm not that far along in my career (assistant prof in econ) but I know many of the people working in my area personally, so it's not clear how much value I'd get out of a search engine like yours -- not that the information isn't useful, but people working in the area have already internalized a lot of it. For prospective grad students or other people outside the field, that obviously wouldn't apply.
    - mhluongo 14y ago
      Right now, I think we'll be most useful to grad students. I think we'll also be a good tool for lit review, less cohesive fields, or interdisciplinary work. We've found your anecdote to be true time and again, though the effect varies by field. I spoke to two CS professors who had interesting views. The first told me he "knew everyone", and that the tool wasn't worth his time- the second said that he "thought he knew everyone", but had a great use regardless. He wanted his students and peers to try it so that they could learn the movers in his part of computer science, and take over the conference he'd been organizing.
      - pseut 14y ago
milesokeefe 14y ago
So far in my using it, it appears to offer the same features as Google Scholar, and I can't find much on the about page. How would you describe your new take? Also I would recommend adding a meta image of your icon on at least the index page, because the only images available for preview when sharing on Facebook are pictures of the developers.[1] [1]http://i.imgur.com/NljWy.png http://i.imgur.com/NljWy.png
- mhluongo 14y ago
  I think I answered this question on the other comment, but more concretely you can * browse the citation and co-authorship graphs without jumping between PDFs. * find authors relevant to your searches- when we do our job right, serendipitously. I think many of our future features are going to hew closely to "there's power in people".
pataprogramming 14y ago
Very fast and unfiltered initial reaction: This site is very heavy. Literature reviews are a process of finding the tens of papers you need out of thousands of candidates, and this site gives ten results per slow-loading page. The results take up a lot of screen real estate, and are not optimized for scanning. Whitespace usage seems to be intended as something to make the site look pretty and modern without any particular functional value. The right column is annoying. The "Authors" heading is way to the right, making it hard to figure out what it's supposed to be. And all enties in the search I did seemed to be labelled "related publications", so it's not immediately clear why it would be headed "Authors". The author pages are pretty slight when you get to them and, again, are not well-optimized for quick visual extraction of information. The paper page is terrible. Even on my 1920x1200 screen, a long paper name takes up over half the page height. Useful targets (like obtaining PDFs and bib info) are small and hard to find relative to the giant, useless title. And why on earth would one need to click on a "see more" in order to see the full list of citations? When you do click through, the sliding transition holds no value and the list is filled with duplicates (e.g., http://scholr.ly/paper/2887595/enhancing-search-performance-on-gnutella-like-p2p-systems-ieee-transactions-on-parallel-and-distributed-systems-tpds-2006-yingwu-zhu-received-the-phd-degree-in-computer-science-engineering-from-university-of-cincinnati-in-2005-he-received-the-bs-a/citations http://scholr.ly/paper/2887595/enhancing-search-performance-...). Google Scholar, despite the fact the you can't easily surf citations in both directions, is very useful for hoovering up a large number of papers so their relevance can be assessed. This site is not, and doesn't seem to provide any particular new value in paper discovery. If there's something else going on here, it isn't immediately obvious. The academic search space has a lot of opportunity for improvement, but for me the interface of this site just adds friction to an already painful process.
- mhluongo 14y ago
  First, thanks for the honesty. We're far from where we want to be and I appreciate the criticism. I'll address your criticisms in another comment, but first I'd like to ask- what could we do to improve your academic search? Where are you coming from, and what do you need fixed?
  - 14y ago
davekinkead 14y ago
Here's some feedback from 5 mins of use. (My field is philosophy) Searching for paper title 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' doesn't return the paper or author. Searching for keywords 'Democratic Authority' returns unrelated CS, engineering, and risk management results but no philosophy or political science results. Searching for author wasn't effective - top hit for 'AJ Simmons' was 'Jennifer Pealer M. A' Lots of gobbledigook in the results > ⌊aj⌋xj + fj≤f0 > expand > > 2007 > > n� j=1 ajxj + Substitute aj = ⌊aj ⌋ + fj, b = ⌊b ⌋ + f0. Then, So all up, not very promising from my initial perspective and as a user, I see no clear advantage over GS. The think that academic search seems to lack right now is the ability to follow citations easily. In early stage research, I would love to be able enter a keyword eg 'Philosophical anarchism' and follow the citation trail but limited to that keyword eg show citing papers based on their impact AND keyword match.
- mhluongo 14y ago
  We're only indexing computer and information science related articles right now. One of the interface's most obvious failures is communicating that- we'll try to improve the messaging and make that more clear. Coverage of material in philosophy is down the road. What about following keywords in Scholrly doesn't satisfy what you need?
  - davekinkead 14y ago
    Compare these two searches from a mathematics & CS related area of philosophy: http://scholr.ly/results/?q=bayesian+epistemology&x=0&y=0&page=0 http://scholr.ly/results/?q=bayesian+epistemology&x=0&#3... http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=bayesian+epistemology&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=bayesian+epistemology... Scholrly omits big names like Hartmann and Talbott. Most of the author section is actually filled with non-people. The publications section doesn't show me citation count or any reason why it might be relevant such as keyword highlights or score. I'd have a very hard time trusting these results that have such clear omissions. 'Causal Inference' at least includes Judea Pearl as a top hit but clicking the link http://scholr.ly/paper/1147771/the-mathematics-of-causal-inference-in-statistics http://scholr.ly/paper/1147771/the-mathematics-of-causal-inf... sends me to a page that is 80% white space and not very informative. Then compare http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bAipNH8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bAipNH8AAAAJ&#38... with http://scholr.ly/person/5080037/judea-pearl http://scholr.ly/person/5080037/judea-pearl Why do I want to look at an empty page with a picture of an owl? (Pearl by the way is a rockstar CS professor with 400+ papers and nearly 50k citations - you list a single paper of his) My biggest pain point of academic search is knowing where I should spend my limited time researching. GS does an OK job of pointing me in the right direction but scholrly wastes my time with numerous dead ends.
dude_abides 14y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned MSR academic search in the comments yet. It is light-years better than Google Scholar. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ Example author page: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1180211/hari-balakrishnan http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1180211/hari-b... Example citation graph: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211&citation http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021... Coauthor graph: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021... And finally, the most addictive feature, coauthor path: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211&1112639 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021...
- mhluongo 14y ago
  I'm not as surprised. I'm not certain MSR markets the project at all, for all the promise it has.
jrochkind1 14y ago
The big challenge with 'scholarly search' is that what users want is to get to fulltext, but most scholarly fulltext is behind paywalls. Google Scholar and MSN Academic both have ways of trying to deal with this. Interestingly, both often get you to a copy from the extensive number of "a professor illegally posted a PDF on the public web even though the publisher holds copyright and wouldn't allow that" copies. Google Scholar also will try to let you register your academic affiliation as a 'preference' and use the academic institution's infrastructure to get you to a post-authenticated licensed copy. scholar.ly... doesn't seem to do this all that well. I'm surprised that dude_abides thinks MSN Academic is 'light years better than Google Scholar', hasn't been my experience. (I happen to work in the field we're talking about, being a software developer for a university library)
- mhluongo 14y ago
  We're only open-access right now, so there's no need to supply university credentials. Just click on a result to expand it and get the full-text, or go to the paper result page and click "full-text".
olympus 14y ago
I went and did a couple searches and the publications search always cut out after the first page. The list of authors would continue for multiple pages though. Not sure if this is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, but I thought I'd point it out. FYI, my searches were just test searches to see how much depth you had in my field, like "bootstrapping," "pattern recognition," and "classifier fusion."
- mhluongo 14y ago
  Sorry! That's a regression, we'll take care of it- thank you!

37 points by mhluongo 14y ago

http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-torture-of-the-highest-form/ http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur... Years of CIA interrogation and you're still in denial on Mr. God. God says... melted furnace exaltedness hurts_my_head SUCH starting-place Willing Eternity stages revolved Jesus fixed injure bewailed disalloweth glided befalls Glad stories departed fuller do_not_disturb slumin prepare all-sufficient Lo variance weak men's woman's softened knocked showing sighs renew Ireland surveyed saw nourished Jacob once_upon_a_time endures daughter-in-law Arians seventh Because boiled tune hi six Light looked growth reigning along foreshow Unless expends thing gnawed muddy won allowances Libya That's_my_favorite listening outward subjoins perfect prove forget comfort arguments director appeared Shine reports formest marking for greeted treasured miserably fake grasps Being happeneth thither urge unwholesome wove Etexts lest recognise brother acute objected extended dragons auditor complaints moveth soever ---- Don't tell me. Tell God. You're in denial. Randomly crack-open a book. God says... his daughter to wife also. 29:29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid. 29:30 And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more than Leah, and served with him yet seven other years. 29:31 And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren. 29:32 And Leah conceived, and bare a son, and she called his name Reuben: for she said, Surely the LORD hath looked upon my affliction; now therefore my husband will love me. 29:33 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the LORD hath heard I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also: and she called his name Simeon.

kanzure 14y ago

I seem to recall when Google Scholar came out that they had a set of example queries. Maybe this was another search engine that did this. Anyway, a set of sample queries with results that you're proud of would be nice to see on scholr.ly, because apparently I can't figure out how to use it. I tried some queries and the results were awful. query: author:"george church" ... I see only one publication, titled "registered trademark of AAAS. Synthetic Gene Networks That Count" which must be wrong. query: author:"george whitesides" ... again only one publication ("New Editorial Board Chair"), and a coauthor named "Dropspots Microdevice" http://scholr.ly/person/6263228/dropspots-microdevice http://scholr.ly/person/6263228/dropspots-microdevice Naturally, his affiliation is listed as "for Lab on a Chip". query: "Rapid casting of patterned vascular networks for perfusable engineered three-dimensional tissues" (the title of a recent paper) returned a few publication results, none of which were the publication in question. It was in Nature Materials, so it's not exactly obscure. query: doi:10.1038/nmat3357 ... no results found. Hmm. Well, I don't know how to use this site. Here's what I really want: * I want a public domain, reusable index of all papers everywhere. I want bibtex, xml, json, and all the other terrible formats for keeping track of those papers. * I want working Zotero translators that can properly extract metadata from all science publishing sites. And I just want this data instead of having to fish it out of a search engine. * I want to be told where I can find pdf files hosted on sites, so that I don't have to send emails begging for copies. Google Scholar does this pretty well. * Actual data about which papers cite what, instead of trusting the "cited by" links/results in Google Scholar. Also, a "this paper cites..." feature so that I don't have to bother digging out the doi numbers from the bibliography myself. * Supplementary documents are evil, but they exist and they should be immediately available next to or with any paper. Edit: * An index of which libraries at which universities are subscribed to which publishers. If anyone wants to contribute to this information, please go to your library's ezproxy service (ezproxy.lib.whoever.edu:2048/menu or sometimes on a different subdomain) and copy/paste to kanzure@gmail.com for aggregation. This is useful for understanding which universities are likely to have access to which papers. Each service listed also has either partial/incomplete subscription and very rarely full subscription, but getting a list of the exact access rights is even harder to squirrel out. Tracking down access to papers is a pain in the butt. ILL is silly and costs way too much ($0.30/query say whaaat). * I also want an academic aggregator that has the balls to go after OCLC, WorldCat, etc. I wish Bill Gates would just buy the entire scientific publishing industry, but alas! I should emphasize this OCLC alternative would be open-access. Mendeley doesn't count, I can't even get their data out. I'm definitely neglecting some other major issues..

bioinformatics 14y ago
Every other week we have another "scientific search" service aggregator, etc coming out that doesn't address half of what you mentioned above. Spot on your review.
mhluongo 14y ago
Actually- we address some of that! So we don't quite provide a Zotero data utopia (yet...), but * each paper page has PDF links and BibTeX * we extract citation data from PDFs so you can browse the citation graph immediately. We're working on stats right now, but everything we extract is publicly inspectable. * we're all about open access- in fact, we are only open access, and will do our best to contribute back to bettering academic communication. * trust me, we have the balls. Still working on the rest.
- kanzure 14y ago
  > we extract citation data from PDFs so you can browse the > citation graph immediately Can you just.. give us the citation data instead? How is this better than ISI and other vendors? Edit: removed some other comments. That's my most important question.
  - mhluongo 14y ago
    I don't mean to be obtuse, but what would that look like? We've been focused on providing a better browsing experience with these citations, but if there's a demand for them in a different format I don't see why we wouldn't provide it.
    - kanzure 14y ago
      I imagine it would look like raw data, probably json. Then you can do the mashups play, etc. I think Elsevier has tried some of that to some success (look at their API docs). Mendeley is also trying this approach and has done fairly well so far.
      - 14y ago

pseut 14y ago

So, not trying to be a dick, but what does it do? Is it supposed to be a better Google Scholar? The "about" page is pretty terse and all it tells me is that your site is "lovingly crafted" which I'm sure is very wonderful, but uninformative.

mhluongo 14y ago
That's not "dick" at all- we need better messaging. We're a people-focused academic search engine, currently for computer science. Instead of just returning papers, we also deliver authors relevant to those papers. The idea is that there's a bunch of value in the citation and co-authorship networks that aren't exposed when results are simply flat PDFs.
- pseut 14y ago
  Who is this aimed for? PhD students? Faculty? Businesses looking for consultants? I'm not that far along in my career (assistant prof in econ) but I know many of the people working in my area personally, so it's not clear how much value I'd get out of a search engine like yours -- not that the information isn't useful, but people working in the area have already internalized a lot of it. For prospective grad students or other people outside the field, that obviously wouldn't apply.
  - mhluongo 14y ago
    Right now, I think we'll be most useful to grad students. I think we'll also be a good tool for lit review, less cohesive fields, or interdisciplinary work. We've found your anecdote to be true time and again, though the effect varies by field. I spoke to two CS professors who had interesting views. The first told me he "knew everyone", and that the tool wasn't worth his time- the second said that he "thought he knew everyone", but had a great use regardless. He wanted his students and peers to try it so that they could learn the movers in his part of computer science, and take over the conference he'd been organizing.
    - pseut 14y ago

milesokeefe 14y ago

So far in my using it, it appears to offer the same features as Google Scholar, and I can't find much on the about page. How would you describe your new take? Also I would recommend adding a meta image of your icon on at least the index page, because the only images available for preview when sharing on Facebook are pictures of the developers.[1] [1]http://i.imgur.com/NljWy.png http://i.imgur.com/NljWy.png

mhluongo 14y ago
I think I answered this question on the other comment, but more concretely you can * browse the citation and co-authorship graphs without jumping between PDFs. * find authors relevant to your searches- when we do our job right, serendipitously. I think many of our future features are going to hew closely to "there's power in people".

pataprogramming 14y ago

Very fast and unfiltered initial reaction: This site is very heavy. Literature reviews are a process of finding the tens of papers you need out of thousands of candidates, and this site gives ten results per slow-loading page. The results take up a lot of screen real estate, and are not optimized for scanning. Whitespace usage seems to be intended as something to make the site look pretty and modern without any particular functional value. The right column is annoying. The "Authors" heading is way to the right, making it hard to figure out what it's supposed to be. And all enties in the search I did seemed to be labelled "related publications", so it's not immediately clear why it would be headed "Authors". The author pages are pretty slight when you get to them and, again, are not well-optimized for quick visual extraction of information. The paper page is terrible. Even on my 1920x1200 screen, a long paper name takes up over half the page height. Useful targets (like obtaining PDFs and bib info) are small and hard to find relative to the giant, useless title. And why on earth would one need to click on a "see more" in order to see the full list of citations? When you do click through, the sliding transition holds no value and the list is filled with duplicates (e.g., http://scholr.ly/paper/2887595/enhancing-search-performance-on-gnutella-like-p2p-systems-ieee-transactions-on-parallel-and-distributed-systems-tpds-2006-yingwu-zhu-received-the-phd-degree-in-computer-science-engineering-from-university-of-cincinnati-in-2005-he-received-the-bs-a/citations http://scholr.ly/paper/2887595/enhancing-search-performance-...). Google Scholar, despite the fact the you can't easily surf citations in both directions, is very useful for hoovering up a large number of papers so their relevance can be assessed. This site is not, and doesn't seem to provide any particular new value in paper discovery. If there's something else going on here, it isn't immediately obvious. The academic search space has a lot of opportunity for improvement, but for me the interface of this site just adds friction to an already painful process.

mhluongo 14y ago
First, thanks for the honesty. We're far from where we want to be and I appreciate the criticism. I'll address your criticisms in another comment, but first I'd like to ask- what could we do to improve your academic search? Where are you coming from, and what do you need fixed?
- 14y ago

davekinkead 14y ago

Here's some feedback from 5 mins of use. (My field is philosophy) Searching for paper title 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' doesn't return the paper or author. Searching for keywords 'Democratic Authority' returns unrelated CS, engineering, and risk management results but no philosophy or political science results. Searching for author wasn't effective - top hit for 'AJ Simmons' was 'Jennifer Pealer M. A' Lots of gobbledigook in the results > ⌊aj⌋xj + fj≤f0 > expand > > 2007 > > n� j=1 ajxj + Substitute aj = ⌊aj ⌋ + fj, b = ⌊b ⌋ + f0. Then, So all up, not very promising from my initial perspective and as a user, I see no clear advantage over GS. The think that academic search seems to lack right now is the ability to follow citations easily. In early stage research, I would love to be able enter a keyword eg 'Philosophical anarchism' and follow the citation trail but limited to that keyword eg show citing papers based on their impact AND keyword match.

mhluongo 14y ago
We're only indexing computer and information science related articles right now. One of the interface's most obvious failures is communicating that- we'll try to improve the messaging and make that more clear. Coverage of material in philosophy is down the road. What about following keywords in Scholrly doesn't satisfy what you need?
- davekinkead 14y ago
  Compare these two searches from a mathematics & CS related area of philosophy: http://scholr.ly/results/?q=bayesian+epistemology&x=0&y=0&page=0 http://scholr.ly/results/?q=bayesian+epistemology&x=0&#3... http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=bayesian+epistemology&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=bayesian+epistemology... Scholrly omits big names like Hartmann and Talbott. Most of the author section is actually filled with non-people. The publications section doesn't show me citation count or any reason why it might be relevant such as keyword highlights or score. I'd have a very hard time trusting these results that have such clear omissions. 'Causal Inference' at least includes Judea Pearl as a top hit but clicking the link http://scholr.ly/paper/1147771/the-mathematics-of-causal-inference-in-statistics http://scholr.ly/paper/1147771/the-mathematics-of-causal-inf... sends me to a page that is 80% white space and not very informative. Then compare http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bAipNH8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bAipNH8AAAAJ&#38... with http://scholr.ly/person/5080037/judea-pearl http://scholr.ly/person/5080037/judea-pearl Why do I want to look at an empty page with a picture of an owl? (Pearl by the way is a rockstar CS professor with 400+ papers and nearly 50k citations - you list a single paper of his) My biggest pain point of academic search is knowing where I should spend my limited time researching. GS does an OK job of pointing me in the right direction but scholrly wastes my time with numerous dead ends.

dude_abides 14y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned MSR academic search in the comments yet. It is light-years better than Google Scholar. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ Example author page: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1180211/hari-balakrishnan http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1180211/hari-b... Example citation graph: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211&citation http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021... Coauthor graph: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021... And finally, the most addictive feature, coauthor path: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#1180211&1112639 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer#118021...

mhluongo 14y ago
I'm not as surprised. I'm not certain MSR markets the project at all, for all the promise it has.

jrochkind1 14y ago

The big challenge with 'scholarly search' is that what users want is to get to fulltext, but most scholarly fulltext is behind paywalls. Google Scholar and MSN Academic both have ways of trying to deal with this. Interestingly, both often get you to a copy from the extensive number of "a professor illegally posted a PDF on the public web even though the publisher holds copyright and wouldn't allow that" copies. Google Scholar also will try to let you register your academic affiliation as a 'preference' and use the academic institution's infrastructure to get you to a post-authenticated licensed copy. scholar.ly... doesn't seem to do this all that well. I'm surprised that dude_abides thinks MSN Academic is 'light years better than Google Scholar', hasn't been my experience. (I happen to work in the field we're talking about, being a software developer for a university library)

mhluongo 14y ago
We're only open-access right now, so there's no need to supply university credentials. Just click on a result to expand it and get the full-text, or go to the paper result page and click "full-text".

olympus 14y ago

I went and did a couple searches and the publications search always cut out after the first page. The list of authors would continue for multiple pages though. Not sure if this is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, but I thought I'd point it out. FYI, my searches were just test searches to see how much depth you had in my field, like "bootstrapping," "pattern recognition," and "classifier fusion."

mhluongo 14y ago
Sorry! That's a regression, we'll take care of it- thank you!