Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based

academic search engines This article contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific and ...

for

academic publication Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...

s and literature, developed by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

, shut down in 2022. At the same time, OpenAlex launched and claimed to be a successor to Microsoft Academic.

History

Microsoft Academic gained prominence because it profiled authors, organizations, keywords, and journals and made the dataset available as

open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...

, in contrast to

Google Scholar 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 p ...

. The search engine indexed over 260 million publications,Microsoft Academic
/ref> 88 million of which are journal articles. Preliminary reviews by

bibliometrician A bibliometrician is a researcher or a specialist in bibliometrics. It is near-synonymous with an informetrican (who studies informetrics), a scientometrican (who study scientometrics) and a webometrician, who study webometrics. Notable bibliometr ...

s suggested the new Microsoft Academic Search was a competitor to

, Web of Science, and

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

for academic research purposes as well as citation analysis. However, it was primarily used as a resource in the field of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

since that was the most completely indexed information. On May 4, 2021, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Academic website and APIs would be retired on December 31, 2021. Thanks to the

license, the Microsoft Academic dataset was able to be merged into OpenAlex. However, the underlying software was proprietary and had to be rewritten. The fact that Microsoft launched and soon after shut down both Microsoft Academic and its predecessor

Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft Academic Search was a research project and academic search engine retired in 2012. It relaunched in 2016 as Academic. History Microsoft launched a search tool called Windows Live Academic Search in 2006 to directly compete with Google ...

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".

Technology

The Academic Knowledge API offered information retrieval from the underlying database using REST endpoints for advanced research purposes. 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. Aside from academic publications, it was also used to find websites that contain state and local records. The technology uses machine learning, semantic inference and knowledge discovery from sources crawled and indexed by the Bing search engine. Microsoft Academic replaced the earlier Microsoft research project,

, which ended development in 2012. The platform was developed in 2009 of the Microsoft Research branch in Asia and the project was headed by Zaiqing Nie. Microsoft Academic was re-launched in 2016, as a tool that features an entirely new data structure and search engine using

semantic search Semantic search denotes search with meaning, as distinguished from lexical search where the search engine looks for literal matches of the query words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning of the query. Semantic search seek ...

technologies.

References

External links

Microsoft Academic website

Project description on Microsoft Research website
Internet properties with year of establishment missing Online databases Microsoft websites Scholarly search services Bibliographic databases and indexes Internet properties established in 2016 {{database-stub

History

Technology

See also

References

External links