Microsoft does Scholar.... Visualising Literature...

At the recent eResearch Australasia Conference, a visualisation contest brought me into contact with Microsoft Academic Search (MAS).

MAS provides an API to interrogate the database of 38M articles programmatically. Including access to title, author, journal, abstract, keywords, citations. See User Manual here.

Cyrus from Versi and I proposed a service where a tag cloud is generated from abstract text from articles with a certain keyword. Here is my text to a Microsoft reviewer after the competition. Kudos to David Flanders for passing this on: -->mail begins...

The basic pitch is to assist researchers to do literature reviews with targetted tag cloud summaries of relevant articles.


1. By topic (provided by MAS)
2. By abstract text. We had trouble with the API getting to the abstracts.

ie extract abstract text by API, and build tag cloud. Each word links to list of articles with an abstract containing the selected text fragment.

3. By keyword. We had trouble accessing publication keywords with the API.

ie extract keywords for target articles by API, and build tag cloud. Each keyword links to list of articles with selected keyword.

This is similar to the co-author path, but for keywords.
ie this code gave us blanks:

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/table.svc/search?AppId=&FullTextQuery=data+mining&ResultObjects=publication&PublicationContent=Keyword&StartIdx=1&EndIdx=10

My APP-ID: xxx [Microsoft issued me an API within 24 hours. Fast service.]
Benefits: The MAS API has a lot of potential to automate (do the heavy lifting) for researchers saving potentially many hours. My demo was aimed to replicate a three day literature review I did recently (for corrections on my PhD; valman.blogspot.com) in close to sixty seconds. Saving researchers time like this could likely result in strong word of mouth recommendations for Microsoft Academic Search.

Any questions, please let me know. I enjoyed the faceted browsing of MAS, and hope the API will be improved to improve the stability of the functions we tried to get working.


Likes: faceted search, tabular output, access (theoretically) to abstract, keywords, author, title. Good access to references. A lot of potential going forward. Many articles. Good journals included in my field (Business, economics).

Dislikes: no community content in forum to answer api problems, difficulty getting API to work as documented (ie difficulty accessing keywords and abstracts). Little community activity on forum suggests need more promotion of tool. Looking at one journal (eg http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Journal/4773/ind-market-manag-industrial-marketing-management) it was unclear which selection criteria were used on articles displayed and in what order they were presented.

Keep up the good work. Lot of potential here...

How to write a PhD? Great PhD resources

I found a number of books key resources in getting a PhD written:

• Evans D. & Gruba P.   (2007). 2nd Ed. How to write a better thesis. Melb uni Press: Melbourne - plan the struture following standard format
• Dunleavy, P. (2003). Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a Doctoral Thesis or Dissertation. Palgrave McMillan: Basingstoke.- chase paradoxes, rather than gaps in the literature, writing paragraphs (unity and coherence)
• Booth, W.C. et al. (2003) The craft of research. U of C Press : London - focus on how/why questions

My key challenge (among many) was I didn't know how to write an essay. After two degrees (Commerce and Law), a Masters thesis (40,000 words), I could not write an essay. I had to go back to basics and learn to write a five paragraph essay. Topic: Cats are better than dogs. Discuss.
Write an answer and give it to someone who writes well and ask them; do I know how to write an essay? If you do not, then learn. Fast. If you are a researcher, research how to write an essay.


My archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20070830094840/http:/www.thejoie.com.au/phd/

My advice: Write a blog about your process (share your journey). See mine at www.valman.blogspot.com. I recently passed 10,000 views.

Lewin AY (2003) Letter from the new Editor JIBS (2003) 34, 1-4 @3
What makes a good paper - Journal of International Business Studies?

"path breaking original research"

"investigates significant research question"
"theoretically grounded [logical hypotheses]"
"appropriate data"
"state of the art empirical methods"
"useful implications for ... practice"
"clear statement of purpose"
"key findings that imply new and surprising insights"
"advance theory"
"appropriate and concise literature review"
"discuss core concepts"
"alternative explanations"

discuss
"draw out implications"
"advance theory"
"discuss implications"

Apple talks Value on Q4 Earnings call

Apple reiterated some of their strong value language, which is worth repeating: 1.CEO Cook:

"We are dedicated to making the very best products in the world and we think about the smallest of details and we are unwilling to cut [corners] in delivering the best customer experience to the world. [It's] this relentless commitment to innovation and excellence [that] is the reason that our customer[s] choose [] our products and this will always be the driving force behind Apple. We are [building] the company for the long run and will continue to make great long-term decision[s]. We[] remain[] very, very confident in our strategy and will use our world-class skill and hardware, software and services to delight our customer[s]."

2.CFO Oppenheimer:

"We also added the iPad Mini to our iPad line-up. The iPad Mini has the iPad experience and we priced it aggressively at $329 delivering incredible value to our customers."

3.CEO, Cook on iPad Mini:

"one of the things we tried to is to create a product that people will love for month and years after they purchase it and continue using it in a robust way. So that’s what iPad Mini has been designed to do and you can only see that more broadly on iPad by looking at the usage statistics, as I had mentioned earlier this week, over 90% of the web traffic from tablets are from iPad. And so, Apple will not make a product that somebody may feel good about it for the moment that they’re paying for and then when they get it, they really ever use [ever], that’s not what we’re about, it’s not a kind of experience we want our customers to have. And I think when you – I would encourage you to use an iPad Mini and I don’t think we’ll be using anything other than maybe another iPad or something app that you do there."

4.CEO, Cook on low cost iPad competitors:

"We've seen low-cost challenges before and iPad continues to beat every other tablet on the market... it can be any price and so we think customers are very smart, we think they have very high expectations, we think that they want a device that can do more and we are confident that our focus on making the best product is what will win at the end of the day and so we will stay true to that."

Source: Q4'12 transcript earnings call http://seekingalpha.com/article/952971-apple-s-ceo-discusses-f4q12-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

Apple Financial News:

Meantime, Apple posted a 2012 $41.7B annual profit ($25.9B 2011), the second highest nominal profit in history, breaking into the Top 5 annual profits, all held previously, by Exxon-Mobil (see Wikipedia). Apple passed Exxon-Mobil as the largest public company by market capitalisation in the last twelve months (Q1 2012 - see Wolfram Alpha). Apple, on the Fortune 500, with this result moved from #17 to #5 (if the others did not move) as revenue rose to $156.5B from $108B in 2011.

Higher Education facing value shift / disruption from online teaching

Higher education revenue models are threatened by free online classes from prestigious institutions. I have just completed a course in Model Thinking (Understanding complex social systems) taught by Prof. Scott E. Page, University of Michigan and Sante Fe Institute at Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/#course/modelthinking).

This is a significant potential disruption of Universities teaching revenue. Fee free courses are a significant value add to current courses. Potential revenue models are for providers to charge employer for access to top performing students. See for instance discussion of Udacity model in this video:
Coursera has been offering courses from Stanford, Michigan and Princeton. MIT and Harvard similarly are offering courses from their EdX webite.

Unlocking Value; Macro value shift

There are days or moments when what you value shifts dramatically. Perhaps more specifically the priority of value shifts. Today our first child, a son was born, and the possible became the actual.

Welcome Mackenzie. Our lives and our value will never be the same.

I submitted my PhD on 01.12.11: Now to family....

In the race to submit my PhD or become a father, the PhD won by six weeks. We are due to have our first child on 14.01.12.

My supervisor asked me to write journal articles now. The Academy of Management papers are due 10 Jan, and the 2012 theme is The Informal Economy. The Informal Economy is that part of the economy which is not taxed, not legal, not controlled by the Government, and not included in GDP.

I am thinking about how value might be relevant, and how my new job at the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) might be relevant. ANDS is a Dept of Innovation (Aust) project to encourage researchers to share, find and reuse each others' data. ANDS works with all the Australian Universities, and public sector agencies to encourage data management, data sharing and reuse. Current ANDS funding (about $70 million) is up to June 2013. Our database of shared data collections is at about 40,000.

I am thinking about a paper called: ANDS, Innovation and Value: an Informal analysis.
The idea being that value captures much that is not in GDP, and that ANDS is building value through knowledge and relationship creation, both of which are part of the Informal Economy. The Informal Economy is not just illegal, black market, and third world commerce. The Informal Economy is innovating without promise of revenue, volunteering for social rather than financial benefit, unpaid family work such as parenting, caring and other volunteering. The informal economy that I am interested in is not an illegal black economy but a virtuous black, white or rainbow value economy.

Thus I argue that:
1. we all (or nearly all) participate in the informal value-creating volunteering economy
2. $ are not the only goal of the informal economy, but also value creation.
3. Value drives activity where there are no $ drivers. For instance, artists, musicians, family work, non-profit associations, volunteers and other unpaid work.
4. The informal economy is not all about $, law and tax. It's about value.

Where does value fit in innovation?

Figure 1 shows the black box of value in the context of innovation theory. Value sits between the innovators creation of an innovation, and the process of diffusion of innovation. I argue consumer value acts as a hurdle to diffusion (see Section 6.3, Proposition 1).

Proposition 1. Value drives consumer action. Consumers adopt new technology when they see value.

Figure 1: What is consumer value? This thesis opens the black box of consumer value.