Microsoft Academic Search

Microsoft launched a search tool called Windows Live Academic Search in 2006 to directly compete with Google Scholar.^[2] It was renamed Live Search Academic after its first year and then discontinued two years later.^[3] In 2009, Microsoft Research Asia Group launched a beta tool called Libra in 2009, which was for the purpose of algorithms research in object-level vertical search,^[4] data mining, entity linking, and data visualization.^[5] Libra was redirected to the MAS service by 2011 and contained 27.2 million records for books, conference papers, and journals.^[3]

Although largely functional, the service was not intended to be a production website and ceased to be developed, as was originally intended when the research goals of the project had been met.^[6] The service stopped being updated in 2012.^[7][8] The fact that this decline was not reported on earlier indicated to the authors that the service was largely ignored by academics and bibliometricians alike.^[8]

In July 2014, Microsoft Research announced that Microsoft Academic was evolving from a research project to a production service, and would be integrating with Microsoft's flagship search engine, Bing, and its intelligent personal assistant service, Cortana. “By growing Microsoft Academic Search from a research effort to production,” [Microsoft Research's Kuansan] Wang says, “our goal is to make Bing-powered Cortana the best personal research assistant for our users".^[9]

• Microsoft Academic
• Google Scholar
• CiteSeerX
• Scirus
• List of academic databases and search engines

• Microsoft Academic Search Archived 2014-08-03 at the Wayback Machine
• Project description on Microsoft Research website
• Microsoft Academic Search dataset on Azure Marketplace
• Microsoft Libra