Data Scientists

Jevin West
Daril Vilhena
Daniel Edler
Martin Rosvall
Carl Bergstrom

Questions: jevinw@u.washington.edu

Microsoft Academic Search and Eigenfactor

Microsoft Academic Search is an academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research, providing search capabilities across the scientific literature. All the data are from the Microsoft Academic Search API. For this demo, this includes 2,680,578 publications from the discipline, Computer Science.

The Eigenfactor Project is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to use recent advances in network analysis and information theory to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals, generating paper recommendations, and mapping the structure of academic research.

The Collaboration

In science, knowledge is acquired cumulatively and collaboratively — and the principal mode for sharing this knowledge are institutions of academic publishing such as scholarly journals, conference proceedings, and preprint collections. In science, ideas are built upon ideas, models upon models, verifications upon prior verifications. This cumulative process of construction leaves behind it a latticework of citations, from which we can reconstruct the geography of scientific thought and retrace the paths along which intellectual activity has proceeded. Microsoft Academic Search has aggregated and assembled this citation network from a broad swath of the scholarly literature. The structure of this network, coupled with semantic information from article titles, abstracts, and potentially full-text, reveals the history and the geography of scientific research. These data allow us to retrace the origin of ideas and emergence of new disciplines. They illuminate collaborations across fields and the transfer of knowledge across generational boundaries. They supply quantitative material for assessing the influence of scholarly work and institutions. Most importantly, citation trails can feed search algorithms with valuable information that can be used to better navigate the ever-changing sea of human knowledge that is science.