Microsoft Academic

Last updated
Microsoft Academic
Microsoft Research Homepage Screenshot.png
Type of site
 Bibliographic database
Owner Microsoft
URL academic.microsoft.com
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedFebruary 22, 2016;8 years ago (2016-02-22)
Current statusInactive (No longer accessible after Dec. 31, 2021)

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]

Contents

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

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation index</span> Index of citations between publications

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written publications

Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics to the point that both fields largely overlap.

Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim. The digitization of patent data and increasing computing power have led to a community of practice that uses these citation data to measure innovation attributes, trace knowledge flows, and map innovation networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

ScienceDirect is a searcheable web-based bibliographic database, which provides access to full texts of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier as well of several small academic publishers. It hosts over 18 million publons from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books. The access to the full-text requires subscription, while the bibliographic metadata are free to read. ScienceDirect was launched by Elsevier in March 1997.

Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

Citebase Search was an experimental, semi-autonomous citation index for free, online research literature created at the University of Southampton as part of the Open Citation Project. It harvested open access e-prints from OAI-PMH compliant archives, parses and links their references and indexes the metadata in a Xapian-based search engine. Citebase went live in 2005 and ceased operation in 2013.

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social Sciences Citation Index</span> Citation index product of Clarivate Analytics

The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index which indexes over 3,400 journals across 58 social science disciplines – 1985 to present, and it has 122 million cited references – 1900 to present. It also includes a range of 3,500 selected items from some of the world's finest scientific and technical journals. It has a range of useful search functions such as 'cited reference searching', searching by author, subject, or title. Whilst the Social Sciences Citation Index provides extensive support in bibliographic analytics and research, a number of academic scholars have expressed criticisms relating to ideological bias and its English-dominant publishing nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Academic Search</span> Former academic search engine

Microsoft Academic Search was a research project and academic search engine retired in 2012. It relaunched in 2016 as Microsoft Academic, which in turn was shut down in 2022. The content of the latter was allegedly incorporated into The Lens.

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters Corporation.

OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data, code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Arcadia Fund.

Author-level metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric impact of individual authors, researchers, academics, and scholars. Many metrics have been developed that take into account varying numbers of factors.

There are a number of approaches to ranking academic publishing groups and publishers. Rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations, discipline, a publisher's reputation, and its impact factor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCitations</span>

OpenCitations is a project aiming to publish open bibliographic citation information in RDF. It produces the "OpenCitations Corpus" citation database in the process.

Judit Bar-Ilan was an Israeli computer scientist known for her research in informetrics and scientometrics. She was a professor of information science, and head of the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University.

The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics (LM) is a list of "ten principles to guide research evaluation", published as a comment in Volume 520, Issue 7548 of Nature, on 22 April 2015. It was formulated by public policy professor Diana Hicks, scientometrics professor Paul Wouters, and their colleagues at the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, held between 3–5 September 2014 in Leiden, The Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenAlex</span>

OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. It started operating in January 2022 by OurResearch as a successor of the terminated Microsoft Academic Graph. OpenAlex competes with commercial products such as Clarivate's Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, and is complemented by Bibliometrics tools and an API.

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. 1 2 Ortega, Jose Luis (2014). Academic Search Engines: A Quantitative Outlook. Oxford: Elsevier. p. 71. ISBN   978-1-84334-791-0.
  5. 1 2 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.
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