Citation analysis with microsoft academic

Abstract

We explore if and how Microsoft Academic (MA) could be used for bibliometric analyses. First, we examine the Academic Knowledge API (AK API), an interface to access MA data, and compare it to Google Scholar (GS). Second, we perform a comparative citation analysis of researchers by normalizing data from MA and Scopus. We find that MA offers structured and rich metadata, which facilitates data retrieval, handling and processing. In addition, the AK API allows retrieving frequency distributions of citations. We consider these features to be a major advantage of MA over GS. However, we identify four main limitations regarding the available metadata. First, MA does not provide the document type of a publication. Second, the "fields of study" are dynamic, too specific and field hierarchies are incoherent. Third, some publications are assigned to incorrect years. Fourth, the metadata of some publications did not include all authors. Nevertheless, we show that an average-based indicator (i.e. the journal normalized citation score; JNCS) as well as a distribution-based indicator (i.e. percentile rank classes; PR classes) can be calculated with relative ease using MA. Hence, normalization of citation counts is feasible with MA. The citation analyses in MA and Scopus yield uniform results. The JNCS and the PR classes are similar in both databases, and, as a consequence, the evaluation of the researchers' publication impact is congruent in MA and Scopus. Given the fast development in the last year, we postulate that MA has the potential to be used for full-fledged bibliometric analyses.

Can Microsoft Academic help to assess the citation impact of academic books?

“…The title, authors/editors and publication year filtering may also remove some correct matches (Thelwall, 2018b). This could occur for books with incorrect publication years in BKCI or Microsoft Academic (Harzing & Alakangas, 2017b;Hug, Ochsner, & Brändle, 2017…”

“…Microsoft Academic is a relaunched free academic citation index that has indexed over 175 million scholarly publications, including from 48,000 journals and 4,000 conferences (https://academic.microsoft.com/ as of June 2018). It captures more citations to journal articles than WoS and Scopus (Harzing & Alakangas, 2017a;Hug, Ochsner, & Brändle, 2017;Thelwall, 2017;Kousha, Thelwall, & Abdoli 2018). Microsoft Academic also indexes books and may also extract citations from them, especially if they are open access.…”

“…Microsoft Academic also indexes books and may also extract citations from them, especially if they are open access. It supports automatic searches, allowing accurate large-scale citation analyses (Hug, Ochsner, & Brändle, 2017;Thelwall, 2018b). Thus, Microsoft Academic seems likely to be useful for the research impact assessment of academic books.…”

Gram

“…No visualization of the graph is provided, although it can be queried using different search methods, and an API is provided. The "fields of study" classifications have been found to be dynamic and too specific, and the hierarchies not always meaningful [30]. Topic extraction: The hierarchical latent tree method extracts a set of hierarchical topics to summarize the corpus at different levels of abstraction -where a "topic" is determined by words that appear in high frequency in the topic, and low frequency in others.…”

Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time

“…Since this update, Microsoft Academic has been gaining traction as a bibliometric research tool, as it approaches Google Scholar in terms of coverage while having much better structure and functionality for researchers akin to Scopus and Web of Science (Hug et al, 2017). Our current design uses a snapshot of this graph from February, 2016 1 ; this updated data set has about 127 million papers and 528 million citations.…”