Next Steps for Microsoft Academic – Expanding into New Horizons | Microsoft Research

TLDR:

Microsoft Academic Website: No longer accessible after Dec. 31, 2020,
Microsoft Academic Graph: No longer providing updated data or access to old releases after Dec. 31, 2021; however, existing copies can still be used under license.

Microsoft Academic has been on a mission to explore new ways to empower researchers and research organizations to achieve more. The research project is characterized by two sets of technologies: one that reads all the Bing-indexed web pages and organizes the most up-to-date academic knowledge into a knowledge base called Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), and the other that performs semantic reasoning and inference to serve that knowledge through the Microsoft Academic search website and API. We are proud that these data and web services have been found useful in numerous research projects around the world, and excited to see more community-driven, public efforts emerge.

One question that we are asked frequently, though, is how the technologies powering Microsoft Academic can be used by institutions outside of academia to make organizational knowledge more discoverable and accessible. Over the years, we have openly shared some of the building blocks, such as the language and network similarity packages, and the core search engine MAKES.  With the continued progress in data access, we believe now is the right time to fully explore opportunities to extend this technology to new industries and transition to community approaches for academic research.

Microsoft Research will continue to support the automated AI agents powering Microsoft Academic services through the end of calendar year 2021. During this time, we encourage existing Microsoft Academic users to begin transitioning to other equivalent services. Below are just a few of the many great options available to the community.

Aminer
CrossRef
Dimensions
lens.org
OpenCitations
Scopus
Semantic Scholar

Thank you very much for the years of support and encouragement. We are immensely grateful to have learned and grown from your feedback over the years. As we are passing the torch to the community-driven efforts, we invite you to join us in continuously contributing ideas and suggestions to nurture, embrace, and grow these platforms.

 

The rise of the “open” discovery indexes? Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse | Musings about librarianship oa.scite

“In this blog post, I will talk specifically on a very important source of data used by Academic Search engines – Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and do a brief review of four academic search engines – Microsoft Academic, Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse ,which uses MAG among other sources….

We live in a time, where large (>50 million) Scholarly discovery indexes are no longer as hard to create as in the past, thanks to the availability of freely available Scholarly article index data like Crossref and MAG.”

Frontiers | Opportunities in Open Science With AI | Big Data

“This article examines the current trends and elaborates the future potentials of AI in its role for making science more open and accessible. Based on the experience derived from a research project called Microsoft Academic, the advocates have reasons to be optimistic about the future of open science as the advanced discovery, ranking, and distribution technologies enabled by AI are offering strong incentives for scientists, funders and research managers to make research articles, data and software freely available and accessible….”

Two new kids on the block: How do Crossref and Dimensions compare with Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus and the Web of Science?

Abstract:  In the last 3 years, several new (free) sources for academic publication and citation data have joined the now well-established Google Scholar, complementing the two traditional commercial data sources: Scopus and the Web of Science. The most important of these new data sources are Microsoft Academic (2016), Crossref (2017) and Dimensions (2018). Whereas Microsoft Academic has received some attention from the bibliometric commu-nity, there are as yet very few studies that have investigated the coverage of Crossref or Dimensions. To address this gap, this brief letter assesses Crossref and Dimensions cover-age in comparison to Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus and the Web of Science through a detailed investigation of the full publication and citation record of a single academic, as well as six top journals in Business & Economics. Overall, this first small-scale study suggests that, when compared to Scopus and the Web of Science, Crossref and Dimensions have a similar or better coverage for both publications and citations, but a substantively lower coverage than Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic. If our find-ings can be confirmed by larger-scale studies, Crossref and Dimensions might serve as good alternatives to Scopus and the Web of Science for both literature reviews and citation analysis. However, Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic maintain their position as the most comprehensive free sources for publication and citation data