Geographic clustering of research universities in specialized fields using Microsoft Academic Search

Search is no doubt the most common activities on the Web. One of the most frequent search activities people in the educational and academic communities do is to search for research topics and papers and their author/affiliation information. For example, undergraduate students searching for graduate schools and master-level students searching for institutions for doctoral studies may go online to find universities that are conducting research in a highly specific field of their interest. A common way of doing this is to search journals and conferences for pertinent articles, and then accumulating the affiliations of the authors. In this paper, we present an interactive web-based academic search interface for discovering geographic clusters of academic institutions given a specific field by the user. The underlying system interacts with Microsoft Academic Search API and Google Places API, as well as Weka for clustering analysis. The system can be easily extended to accommodate other types of queries.