Microsoft announced on Tuesday the release of a beta version of its Windows Live Academic Search service designed to help students, researchers and university faculty conduct research across a spectrum of academic journals.

A preview pane allows customers to see the abstract of a result quickly by hovering their mouse over the result. The service also provides the ability to group and sort results by author, journal, conference and date and offers a citation support in two major bibliographic formats, which enables customers to quickly compile citations.

Furthermore, author "live links" will automatically connect to the search results of articles associated with a particular author.

Direct links to publishers? published version will permit access to the full text of the article if the users are on the network of the institution that subscribes to the full text.

Microsoft also mentionned that in the upcoming weeks it will add to its Live Academic Search service support for Macro and addtionally include RSS so that consumers can be alerted when new information on a topic of their choice is available.

The initial release will target the subjects of computer science, electrical engineering and physics with new subjects to be added online in the near future. Windows Live Academic will provide English-language results.

Organizations working with Microsoft on the Windows Live Academic Search tool include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersIEEE, the Association for Computing MachineryACM, Taylor & Francis Group, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, Ex Libris Group, TDNet, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, the British Library, OCLC Online Computer Library Center and John Wiley & Sons Inc.

The beta service is available starting today in the U.S., UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia. Microsoft said that additional markets and content will be added throughout the beta period.