As of today (1/1/2022), the great website Microsoft Academic (http://academic.microsoft.com/) is gone!
I was hoping to the last minute that someone would rescue this great site from being discontinued. Unfortunately, a knight in shining armor did not show up this time.
Microsoft Academic had several serious advantages over its competitors Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar. I have intensely worked will all three websites over the past two years or so almost on a daily basis to study artificial intelligence and machine learning.
For example, MA would clearly delineate in which journals and what year an article was published. This was very helpful if an article was published in multiple venues at different times. The competitors fail to do that.
The other major competitor, Prophy, a European Union product, is rather bureaucratic and cumbersome. In short, no match!
This is really bad news! Microsoft Academic has some strength and is superior in some respects to its competitors like Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar. I have used it very frequently during the past two years for my research of artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, computational linguistics etc.
Microsoft Academic excels compared to its competitors e.g. in:
One can only hope that Google Scholar will seize the opportunity. Unfortunately, Google Scholar has for several years refused automatic requests to retrieve information and it does not provide an API to do so! Very regrettable! I know, because my efforts to write a Python program to retrieve information has been blocked by Google Scholar!
"Microsoft Academic Website: No longer accessible after Dec. 31, 2021"
Next Steps for Microsoft Academic – Expanding into New Horizons (What an euphemistic announcement!)
I tried dozens of searches for exact title match today with a few hours and they all failed. Intermittently, it seemed to work for one or two searches before it failed again. Was this by any chance related to Microsoft's trouble with Exchange or with hacker attacks?
MA failed to inform its users. Here is a screen print of a typical search failure:
Posted: 8/9/2020 Updated: 9/16/2020
More annoyances will be added!
When you list the publications of an author it will also show the U.S. patents of this author. You can not turn this off! Very annoying!
There is no feedback functionality for the user! Microsoft Academics has it. Semantic Scholar used to have one until recently (8/9/2020)
You cannot filter the publications of an author e.g. by year or venue etc.
Google Scholar only allows you to save 100 scholars in your alerts/follow list. This limit is bizarre and incomprehensible!
I recently also noticed to my great surprise that I did not receive email alerts for at least half a dozen very recent new papers by highly cited authors who I follow for at least several months and longer. This is disturbing to say the least. Often more than one author is listed on the same paper, so I should have actually received 2 or more emails about this paper, but I apparently didn’t. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to document the cases.
The authors listed in your Manage your Alerts list are not linked to their profiles. Very annoying and incomprehensible (9/16/2020)
When a profile in your Alerts list becomes no longer available or no longer public, GS will not notify you nor will it tell you for which author. This is very annoying! E.g. if I knew the author’s name I could then create possibly a new alert with one of the competitors like Semantic Scholar or Microsoft academic. (9/16/2020)
