Microsoft Academic shuts down
Microsoft has closed its Microsoft Academic service from January 1, 2022.
Microsoft Academic started its service in 2016, which allowed researchers to search for
academic articles from Microsoft database of scholarly articles. The search was powered
by AI and semantic inference. It had the opportunity to become a competitor of Google
Scholar but it was never very popular.
According to the LSE impact blog the total traffic to different academic search giants in April 2021 was as follows:
| Academic search engine | Number of visitors (in millions) |
|---|---|
| Google Scholar | 137.5 |
| Semantic Scholar | 8.9 |
| Scopus | 5.2 |
| Web of Knowledge | 4.4 |
| Microsoft Academic | 0.7 |
Microsoft had a previous attempt with Microsoft Academic Search, which was closed down in 2012. In 2016
the academic search engine came back with a fresh technology as the Microsoft Academic. The slogan of
Microsoft Academic to researchers was do less search and more research. The service was barely popular
and perhaps its database was sufficient only for the discipline computer science.
The overall search volume to any academic search engine is not high enough when compared to non-academic
search. Perhaps this was the basis for Microsoft to decide the premature closure of Microsoft Academic
with effect from January 1, 2022.
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Microsoft Academic shuts down
Microsoft has closed its Microsoft Academic service from January 1, 2022.
Microsoft Academic started its service in 2016, which allowed researchers to search for
academic articles from Microsoft database ....
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