Microsoft Academic

Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engine for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research in 2016 as a successor of Microsoft Academic Search. Microsoft Academic was shut down in 2022. Both OpenAlex^[1][2] and The Lens claim to be successors to Microsoft Academic.^[3]

Microsoft Academic

Type of site	Bibliographic database
Owner	Microsoft
URL	academic.microsoft.com
Registration	Optional
Launched	February 22, 2016; 8 years ago (2016-02-22)
Current status	Inactive (No longer accessible after Dec. 31, 2021)

History

Microsoft Academic gained prominence because it profiled authors, organizations, keywords, and journals^[4] and made the dataset available as open data, in contrast to Google Scholar. The search engine indexed over 260 million publications,^[5] 88 million of which are journal articles.^[5]

Preliminary reviews by bibliometricians suggested the new Microsoft Academic Search was a competitor to Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus for academic research purposes^[6][7] as well as citation analysis.^[8][9][10] However, it was primarily used as a resource in the field of computer science since that was the most completely indexed information.^[11]

On May 4, 2021, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Academic website and APIs would be retired on December 31, 2021.^[12]

Thanks to the open data license, the Microsoft Academic dataset was merged into OpenAlex. However, the underlying software was proprietary and had to be rewritten.

That Microsoft launched and soon after shut down both Microsoft Academic and its predecessor Microsoft Academic Search has been interpreted as a sign that Microsoft "had never intended to enter into the business of scholarly metadata. Instead, the tech giant has been using data on scholarly communication as testing ground for big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies".^[13]

Technology

The Academic Knowledge API offered information retrieval from the underlying database using REST endpoints for advanced research purposes.^[14] The search engine provided not only search results and access to sources but also citation information that include the number of sources, g-index, and h-index.^[15] Aside from academic publications, it was also used to find websites that contain state and local records.^[16] The technology uses machine learning, semantic inference and knowledge discovery from sources crawled and indexed by the Bing search engine.^[17]

Microsoft Academic replaced the earlier Microsoft research project, Microsoft Academic Search, which ended development in 2012.^[18] The platform was developed in 2009 of the Microsoft Research branch in Asia and the project was headed by Zaiqing Nie.^[4] Microsoft Academic was re-launched in 2016, as a tool that features an entirely new data structure and search engine using semantic search technologies.

See also

• OpenAlex
• Microsoft Academic Search
• Live Search Academic
• List of academic databases and search engines

References

1. Priem, Jason; Piwowar, Heather; Orr, Richard (2022). "OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts". arXiv:2205.01833 [cs.DL].
2. Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (24 January 2022). "Massive open index of scholarly papers launches". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y.
3. "Results the Lens - Free & Open Patent and Scholarly Search".
4. Ortega, Jose Luis (2014). Academic Search Engines: A Quantitative Outlook. Oxford: Elsevier. p. 71. ISBN 978-1-84334-791-0.
5. Microsoft Academic
6. Harzing, Anne-Wil. "Microsoft Academic (Search): a Phoenix arisen from the ashes?" (PDF). Scientometrics. Retrieved 29 January 2017.
7. Hug, Sven E.; Braendle, Martin P. (2017). "The coverage of Microsoft Academic: Analyzing the publication output of a university". Scientometrics. 113 (3): 1551–1571. arXiv:1703.05539. doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2535-3. S2CID 2458635.
8. Harzing, Anne-Wil; Alakangas, Satu. "Microsoft Academic: is the Phoenix getting wings?" (PDF). Scientometrics. Retrieved 29 January 2017.
9. Hug, Sven E.; Ochsner, Michael; Braendle, Martin P. (2017). "Citation analysis with Microsoft Academic". Scientometrics. 111: 371–378. arXiv:1609.05354. doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2247-8. S2CID 14179411.
10. Haunschild, Robin; Hug, Sven E.; Braendle, Martin P.; Bornmann, Lutz (2017). "The number of linked references of publications in Microsoft Academic in comparison with the Web of Science". Scientometrics. 114: 367–370. arXiv:1710.04031. doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2567-8. S2CID 21342104.
11. Chowdhury, G. G.; Foo, Schubert (2012). Digital Libraries and Information Access: Research Perspectives. Facet Publishing. p. 137. ISBN 978-1-85604-821-7.
12. "Next Steps for Microsoft Academic - Expanding into New Horizons". Microsoft Research. 4 May 2021. Retrieved 2021-05-28.
13. Tay, Aaron; Martín-Martín, Alberto; Hug, Sven E. (27 May 2021). "Goodbye, Microsoft Academic – Hello, open research infrastructure?". Impact of Social Sciences. Retrieved 2 May 2022.
14. Microsoft. "Academic Knowledge API". Microsoft. Retrieved 29 January 2017.
15. Thomas, C. George (2021). Research Methodology and Scientific Writing, Second Edition. Cham: Springer Nature. p. 241. ISBN 978-3-030-64864-0.
16. Parsons, Stephen P. (2019). Interviewing and Investigating: Essentials Skills for the Legal Professional. Frederick, MD: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. p. 505. ISBN 978-1-5438-0107-1.
17. Ahmi, Aidi (2021). Bibliometric Analysis for Beginners: A starter guide to begin with a bibliometric study using Scopus dataset and tools such as Microsoft Excel, Harzing's Publish or Perish and VOSviewer software. p. 25.
18. Van Noorden, Richard (20 May 2014). "The decline and fall of Microsoft Academic Search". blogs.nature.com. Nature. Archived from the original on 23 May 2014. Retrieved 22 December 2016.

External links

• Microsoft Academic website
• Project description on Microsoft Research website