Libra (Academic Search)

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Libra Academic Search is a public search engine for academic papers and literature in the field of computer science, which is developed by Microsoft Research Asia. It uses the method of object-level Vertical search technology. Libra considers Papers, Authors, Conferences, Journals as different types of objects in the research literature. The relevance score of an object is computed by considering all the collected information about its attributes, and the importance score is calculated by considering its relationships with other objects. Libra is hosted on the World Wide Web at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing.

The database of Libra consists of the bibliographic information (metadata) for academic papers published in journals, conferences proceedings. It has over 1.8 million papers and 1.3 million authors mainly in computer science and related subjects as of May 2007, but does not seem to be regularly updated.

The principal other products in the area are Google Scholar, Elsevier's Scirus, and the open source project CiteSeer.