Searching for a researcher's name for finding their work is quite hard using Kagi Search, even when using its academia filter. The search tries to pull papers relevant to researcher's name, but usually gets it wrong.
Names can be hard to index with papers, as names are usually shortened during citations. It was previously suggested by other Kagi users to integrate a few systems for better academic searchers, but this has to be implemented as a separate pipeline to deliver something like Google Scholar. When prompted, Kagi assistant manages to pull certain information about scientific authors, but then again it is a mixed bag. The main suggestion is to improve this search by incorporating various academic sources to build context on a researcher (publicly available information). A built in citation manager/saver or extension, can also help with this task. Additionally, scholar alerts for topics will be hugely helpful to keep track of research being published in fast moving fields.
Integrate the following details to get better context when searching for a researcher using academic lens :
Features missing that are already available on other searches -
Article versions
Citations
Academics tend to search quite frequently for researcher's names (especially in niche fields), to access their papers. For example : Using Google scholar, a normal search with a author's name will aggregate and show a Google scholar profile (if it exists) and list all the papers with the authors name with related works, citations, versions. People who create a profile on Google scholar will have more features like h-index, i10-index, etc.
Kagi misses to show basic features like citations and versions of an article (preprints), which is available in other searches. This also compounds the inability to search for niche topic research authors, when using the academic lens.
Citation managers like Zotero, Paperpile, Mendeley display additional features using their extensions that can be added to the browser. This in turn helps to save research articles on the go.
Kagi also misses ability to set up scholar alerts at the time being, which is already available on Google Scholar.
The best way according to me personally is to implement it as an extension, rather than bloating the main search. This will enable power users (academics mostly) to implement this in their workflow for regular intensive academic search. There is also possibilities of implementing Kagi assist into such an extension to give deeper dives, as there is an audience for it ( example : consensus.app, scholar ai, semantic search, etc).
Alternative way to implement this feature is to vastly improve the academic lens currently implemented in Kagi search.
This overall implementation will help researchers of various fields and locations to do literature survey and keep up with researchers/research topics effectively.
