Yesterday, I was talking with Mike Buschman of Windows Live Academic Search and I set myself a challenge: I suggested to him that I could demonstrate the integration of scholarly publication search directly within Word 2007, all during the course of the presentation we were just about to attend (I had already seen the slides so I could code during the talk).
Yes, I did manage to do it within the time limits of the presentation. The screenshot below shows the end-result. The custom taskpane at the right allows one to search for keywords against Windows Live Academic Search. The user chooses a paper from the returned results to insert in the current document’s bibliography (if you haven’t seen Word 2007‘s bibliography-related features, you should check them out). Once the paper is in the bibliography, it can be inserted in the document as usual.
Most of the time was spent on figuring out the format of the XML structure expected by the Word 2007 bibliography-related object model. Since I couldn’t find the related documentation anywhere, I added few entries manually and then, using VBA, displayed them in a debug window. That gave me an idea on how to convert the XML returned by Windows Live Academic Search. The conversion is currently done in code but I would like to write an XSLT to do this. If it wasn’t for this XML translation, the entire effort would have taken just 10-15 minutes!
I will probably be writing more things like this in the future. Perhaps even articles to capture the process.
11 responses to “Windows Live Academic Search and Word 2007”
This looks very cool. Do you intend to share the code? Also, what would be even nicer is if the research pane could be used to query the source, right? I believe MS at some point indicated that everything is set up so that results from a custom research service can be used as a reference, but I can’t find any information or a single example of that. Do you know more?
Hi David,
I am afraid I don’t understand what you mean by ‘used as a reference’. Do you mean in the bibliography? Please feel free to contact me via email.
I am planning to extend the plugin with some more functionality and then check whether it’d be ok to release the code.
.savas.
Here
http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/07/13/664960.aspx
the Word team writes this:
“Finally, Word provides the ability to search an external library through the Research and Reference pane, introduced in Word 2003. We’ve created a platform for any library to host a service that sends bibliographic data to Word. This means that instead of ever filling out the Create New Source form, you can search external collections for data and import it with one click.”
If I understand this correctly, one might be able to just implement a web service that can be queried by the research pane. Word might (if I understand this correctly) already have the ability to insert search results from the research pane as as reference into a document. But the research service api documentation right now is only available for the 2003 version, so I am a bit lost.
Ok, I see what you mean. I’ll investigate, build a prototype, and post a new entry about this sometime within the week.
Have you found out anything new about this?
As it happens, I was looking at this yesterday! I know how to integrate WLSA into a research tab but I didn’t do it because the results in research tabs (i looked at the Word 2007 ones) are not insertable into the document. They are just links.
Is this what you were looking for?
Again, please feel free to contact me offline if you want.
If you don’t mind I’ll keep it here on the blog, if someone else is looking for this info later it might be helpful.
If you look at the blog post by the Word team, they seem to indicate that there is some way that results from a research tab can be imported into the source list with “one click”. Maybe they removed that? Or just have not documented yet how a library could provide its search results in a format that this works?
Apologies for taking so long on this. I have now followed up with the Office folks and there is going to be a blog post in a couple of weeks regarding the feature you have mentioned.
As soon as they post it, I will link to it via my blog.
Ok, cool! I deduce from that there is something to talk about and it was not cut from the RTM version 😉
I am also looking for a documentation on Word Bibliography XML. I am actually planning to write an export module for JabRef, an open source bibliography management software.
Hi, I was really looking forward to use the Research pane to insert the correct refferences straight from Academic Live Search into the Word Reference list. As you have in the screenshot above. Yet I do not seem to find a way to do this myself, and I got the feeling that this topic died a bit at MS side. Could you release that code you have used above as a plug-in? Cheers