Microsoft Academic Search — Nicholas Wong

Microsoft Academic Search is owned and operated by Microsoft Research. The following is a limited overview because of content restrictions.

Our Goal

To develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of researcher’s behaviors and workflows searching for academic literature independent of tool used. We aimed to supply insights to inform the redesign effort for Microsoft Academic 3.0, which launched in early 2018.

Our Team

The team was comprised of myself and three other seniors in the CGT program at Purdue University. We had two sponsors from Microsoft Research, as well as a faculty mentor from Purdue's CGT program.

Microsoft Research
Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Senior PM at Microsoft
Darrin Eide, Senior Lead Developer at Microsoft

Faculty Mentor
Dr. Colin Gray, Purdue HCDD Graduate Program Co-Chair

My Role

I led contextual inquiry sessions with scholarly researchers, as well as established the look and feel of our presentations and graphics. I also participated in various activities, such as heuristic analysis, semi-structured interviews, and affinity diagraming.

(From Left): Myself, Shubham Gulati, Jason Brier, Megan Tietjen

Research Questions

How do experience level and field of study impact literature review process?
What commonalities and differences exist in the literature review process amongst experienced researchers?
How do experienced researchers identify papers outside their primary field of study?
What tactics do scholars use to identify related works for a paper?
- How do librarians assist researchers in finding relevant information for their topic?

Answering these questions through various methods of user research, led us to the discovery of various opportunities to improve the features and functionality of Microsoft Academic Search

Summary

This project allowed the team and I to do a deep dive into an area that isn't often researched. It was a very rewarding experience and allowed me to grow as a researcher by utilizing various methods and analysis techniques to aid us in detailing out these conclusions.

Thank you to Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu and Darrin Eide of Microsoft Research for giving us the opportunity to do this work.
Thank you to Dr. Colin Gray for advising us and aiding us throughout the duration of this project.

Other Projects