Microsoft Academic automatic document searches: Accuracy for journal articles and suitability for citation analysis

Thelwall, Mike

doi:10.1016/j.joi.2017.11.001

Cited by 31 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The Microsoft Academic API allows 10,000 free queries per month 6 . Adapting practice for journal articles (Thelwall, 2017;Thelwall, 2018b;Kousha, Thelwall, & Abdoli, 2018), the Webometric Analyst free software (http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk) was used to run automatic Microsoft Academic citation searches for the BKCI books sample. The Microsoft Academic queries were generated for all 27,989 books by querying their titles, as shown in the example below.…”

Section: Microsoft Academic Citation Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This strategy gives maximal recall and precision, as previously tested for journal articles. Author names were not added to the query because they may remove correct matches (see Thelwall, 2018b).…”

Section: Microsoft Academic Citation Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whilst for retrieving Microsoft Academic records for journal articles, false matches can be filtered out using article titles, authors, journal names, DOIs and publication years (Thelwall, 2018b), books lack DOIs and journal years, reducing filtering effectiveness. In addition, ISBNs and publisher names are not included in most Microsoft Academic records and so cannot be used.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

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

Kousha

Thelwall

2018

Journal of Informetrics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite recent evidence that Microsoft Academic is an extensive source of citation counts for journal articles, it is not known if the same is true for academic books. This paper fills this gap by comparing citations to 16,463 books from 2013-2016 in the Book Citation Index (BKCI) against automatically extracted citations from Microsoft Academic and Google Books in 17 fields. About 60% of the BKCI books had records in Microsoft Academic, varying by year and field. Citation counts from Microsoft Academic were 1.5 to 3.6 times higher than from BKCI in nine subject areas across all years for books indexed by both. Microsoft Academic found more citations than BKCI because it indexes more scholarly publications and combines citations to different editions and chapters. In contrast, BKCI only found more citations than Microsoft Academic for books in three fields from 2013-2014. Microsoft Academic also found more citations than Google Books in six fields for all years. Thus, Microsoft Academic may be a useful source for the impact assessment of books when comprehensive coverage is not essential.

show abstract

Section: Microsoft Academic Citation Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Microsoft Academic Citation Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

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

Kousha

Thelwall

2018

Journal of Informetrics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…MSA has also recently been used to predict Article Influence scores for open access (OA) journals (Norlander et al, 2018). and Thelwall (2018), using samples of publications, showed there was uniformity between citation analyses done via MSA and Scopus. Harzing & Alakangas (2017a) also showed, for individual researchers, that the citation counts by MSA were similar to or higher than Scopus and WoS, varying across disciplines.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of bibliographic data sources: Implications for the robustness of university rankings

Huang

Neylon

Brookes-Kenworthy

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Universities are increasingly evaluated, both internally and externally on the basis of their outputs. Often these are converted to simple, and frequently contested, rankings based on quantitative analysis of those outputs. These rankings can have substantial implications for student and staff recruitment, research income and perceived prestige of a university. Both internal and external analyses usually rely on a single data source to define the set of outputs assigned to a specific university. Although some differences between such databases are documented, few studies have explored them at the institutional scale and examined the implications of these differences for the metrics and rankings that are derived from them. We address this gap by performing detailed bibliographic comparisons between three key databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and, the recently relaunched Microsoft Academic (MSA). We analyse the differences between outputs with DOIs identified from each source for a sample of 155 universities and supplement this with a detailed manual analysis of the differences for fifteen universities. We find significant differences between the sources at the university level. Sources differ in the publication year of specific objects, the completeness of metadata, as well as in their coverage of disciplines, outlets, and publication type. We construct two simple rankings based on citation counts and open access status of the outputs for these universities and show dramatic changes in position based on the choice of bibliographic data sources. Those universities that experience the largest changes are frequently those from non-English speaking countries and those that are outside the top positions in international university rankings. Overall MSA has greater coverage than Scopus or WoS, but has less complete affiliation metadata. We suggest that robust evaluation measures need to consider the effect of choice of data sources and recommend an approach where data from multiple sources is integrated to provide a more robust dataset. 1 See https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings/methodology , https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/methodology-world-university-rankin gs-2018 , and http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU-Methodology-2017.html . 2 See, for example, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/league-tables . 2 instruments differ in the completeness, comparability and precision of information they provide at the institutional level. Our focus is not on reconstructing a 'true' view of scholarly outputs but in a comparison of this set of tools.

show abstract