Microsoft Academic: is the phoenix getting wings?

Harzing, Anne‐Wil; Alakangas, Satu

doi:10.1007/s11192-016-2185-x

Cited by 73 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The research design was to gather a large recent set of journal articles and to assess the field normalised citation impact advantage of international collaboration overall, when excluding international collaboration, and within broad fields. Scopus was chosen for the data source since it has better coverage of non-English sources than the Web of Science ) and at the time of writing seemed to have more reliable subject classifications than Microsoft Academic (Harzing & Alakangas, 2017) and Dimensions (Thelwall, 2018), with Google Scholar not offering subjectwide classifications (Martín-Martín, Orduna-Malea, Thelwall, & López-Cózar, 2018) and not usually permitting large scale downloading (Harzing, 1997). The data was collected in November 2018 as part of a generic dataset used for multiple studies.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic collaboration rates and citation associations vary substantially between countries and fields

Thelwall

Maflahi

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalised citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the ten countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008-2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two thirds more authors per article than the UK (2.5). Solo authorship is rare in China (4%) but common in the UK (27%). Whilst increasing team size associates with higher citation impact in almost all countries and fields, this association is much weaker in China than elsewhere. There are also field differences in the association between citation impact and collaboration. For example, larger team sizes in the Business, Management & Accounting category do not seem to associate with greater research impact, and for China and India, solo authorship associates with higher citation impact. Overall, there are substantial international and field differences in the extent to which researchers collaborate and the extent to which collaboration associates with higher citation impact.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic collaboration rates and citation associations vary substantially between countries and fields

Thelwall

Maflahi

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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“…There are significant positive Spearman correlations between the Microsoft Academic and BKCI citation counts in all fields and years at the p=0.01 level except for Philosophy, Ethics and Religion, and Other Social Sciences in 2016 ( Figures 6-9). The correlations for science fields such as Physics and Mathematics (ranging from .482 to .726 for 2016 and 2013 respectively), Chemical Sciences (.447 to .661), Engineering and Technology (.439 to .643), Computer Science (.376 to 635) and Biological Sciences (.440 to .585) are higher than for the other fields, perhaps because in these fields journal and conference citations are more common and both databases have similar coverage of core science and medicine journals (Harzing & Alakangas, 2017a). As mentioned above, in the sciences most BKCI citations are from articles indexed by WoS databases (92%) rather than books indexed by BKCI (about 5%) (Kousha, & Thelwall, 2015).…”

Section: Rq3: Correlations Between Microsoft Academic and Bkci Or Goomentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kousha

Thelwall

2018

Journal of Informetrics

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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.

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“…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: 85%

“…WoS, Scopus and MSA all record and maintain their own citation data. While some research have shown that the citation counts across these sources showed high correlations at the author level and journal level (Harzing, 2016;Harzing & Alakangas, 2017a;Harzing & Alakangas, 2017b), the corresponding effects on a set of universities remain relatively unknown. These analyses were also performed using internal citation counts of each source.…”

Section: Citation Countsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…MSA's emergence and fast growth (at a rate of 1.3 million records per month, according to has spurred its use in several bibliometrics studies (De Domenico et al, 2016;Portenoy et al, 2016;Sandulescu & Chiru, 2016;Wesley-Smith et al, 2016;Vaccario et al, 2017;Portenoy & West, 2017;Effendy & Yap, 2017). At the same time, various papers have tracked changes in the MSA database and compared it to other bibliographic sources (Paszcza, 2016;Harzing, 2016;Harzing & Alakangas, 2017a;Harzing & Alakangas, 2017b;. Its rapid development, especially in correcting some vital errors, over the past two years and strength in coverage have been very encouraging.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Huang

Neylon

Brookes-Kenworthy

et al. 2019

Preprint

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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.

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Microsoft Academic: is the phoenix getting wings?

Cited by 73 publications

References 8 publications

Academic collaboration rates and citation associations vary substantially between countries and fields

Academic collaboration rates and citation associations vary substantially between countries and fields

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

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

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