Microsoft Academic is one year old: the Phoenix is ready to leave the nest
Harzing, Anne-Wil 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1509-3003 and Alakangas, Satu
(2017)
Microsoft Academic is one year old: the Phoenix is ready to leave the nest.
Scientometrics, 112
(3)
.
pp. 1887-1894.
ISSN 0138-9130
[Article]
(doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2454-3)
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Abstract
We investigate the coverage of Microsoft Academic (MA) just over a year after its re-launch. First, we provide a detailed comparison for the first author’s record across the four major data sources: Google Scholar (GS), MA, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) and show that for the most important academic publications, journal articles and books, GS and MA display very similar publication and citation coverage, leaving both Scopus and WoS far behind, especially in terms of citation counts.
A second, large scale, comparison for 145 academics across the five main disciplinary areas confirms that citation coverage for GS and MA is quite similar for four of the five disciplines. MA citation coverage in the Humanities is still substantially lower than GS coverage, reflecting MA’s lower coverage of non-journal publications. However, we shouldn’t forget that MA coverage for the Humanities still dwarfs coverage for this discipline in Scopus and WoS.
It would be desirable for other researchers to verify our findings with different samples before drawing a definitive conclusion about MA coverage. However, based on our current findings we suggest that, only one year after its re-launch, MA is rapidly become the data source of choice; it appears to be combining the comprehensive coverage across disciplines, displayed by GS, with the more structured approach to data presentation, typical of Scopus and WoS. The phoenix seems to be ready to leave the nest, all set to start its life into an adulthood of research evaluation.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Research Areas: | A. > Business School > International Management and Innovation > International and Cross-cultural Management group |
| Item ID: | 22153 |
| Notes on copyright: | The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2454-3 |
| Useful Links: | |
| Depositing User: | Anne-Wil Harzing |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Jun 2017 15:03 |
| Last Modified: | 29 Nov 2022 20:40 |
| URI: | https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/id/eprint/22153 |
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