Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engine for academic publications 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 ...

in 2016 as a successor of Microsoft Academic Search. Microsoft Academic was shut down in 2022. Both OpenAlex and The Lens claim to be successors 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 are data that are openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data are generally licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-so ...

, in contrast to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

. The search engine indexed over 260 million publications,Microsoft Academic
/ref> 88 million of which are journal articles. Preliminary reviews by bibliometricians suggested the new Microsoft Academic Search was a competitor to

Web of Science The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedi ...

, and

Scopus Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...

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, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

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 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".

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, Microsoft Academic Search, 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 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 {{Authority control

History

Technology

See also

References

External links