Today Microsoft Corporation has announced the beta release of its Windows Live Academic Search service in English in seven countries which include the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia, the new tool is designed to help students, researchers and universities conduct research across a wide range of academic journals.

Windows Live Academic Search Beta currently covers three main areas of study, these being the fields of: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics within these three fields of study you will have access to more than 6 million records from approximately 4300 journals and 2000 conferences, only three areas of study were chosen to start of this beta because the first feedback wave from this service need’s to be concentrated more to find out if this service really will work or not, after some time has passed more areas of study will be added thus allowing Windows Live Academic Search to reach it’s goal of becoming the most comprehensive, largest academic index possible.

Key user features of Windows Live Academic Search include:

• The slider bar which allows you to expand or contract the amount of information contained in the search result
• The preview pane which allows you to obtain more information on the result that you are hovering over with your mouse on the results pane
• The Abstract option in the preview pane which will allow you to see the abstract of the article that you are hovering over with your mouse on the results pane.
• The BibTeX/EndNote citation option in the preview pane which will allow you to see the formatted citation (BibTeX or EndNote format) on the preview pane for the search result that you are hovering over with your mouse on the results pane
• The sort by drop down menu which allows you to sort the search results by author of paper, journal, conference, date published or relevance
• The RSS feed option which will allow you to add your search to your personalised Live.com page.

Now this is only a small selection of what Windows Live Academic Search as to offer us to date, and I expect we shall see more features like this or better in the future as Windows Live Academic Search Beta grows in to other areas of study thus allowing the content to be more customer orientated as we will be able to personalise what we want to see and from what journals.

Ok so now you know a bit about Windows Live Academic Search why not go and check it out at http://academic.live.com/ and don’t forget you can always submit feedback to the Windows Live Team at wlasinfo@microsoft.com and also if you waould like to see a list of all journals and sources indexed on Windows Live Academic Search Beta then check out http://academic.live.com/journals