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Microsoft substantially enhanced Microsoft Academic Search (MAS), its open access academic search engine, in the middle of 2011, but it needs to eliminate some content and software limitations to become a comprehensive and universal tool for bibliometric/scientometric/informetric analysis of the research performance of individuals, groups, and institutions and for the rating and ranking of journals, conference proceedings and books in all disciplines. It was found that MAS had an h-index of 1,088 for its 27.2 million records, indicating that are 1,088 records that have been cited by the other sources covered in MAS at least 1,088 times. For comparison: the h-index of Scopus is 1,810 for its 45.9 million records, and the h-index of Web of Science (WoS) for its 50.5 million records is 2,130. Considering that the Microsoft Asia Research Group is expanding the source coverage of MAS at a very fast pace, and is extending it to several other disciplinary areas, this free bibliometric service is a project of great interest to those interested in metrics-based research performance evaluation. This paper describes the major content and software features of MAS, and its shortcomings, recommends some further enhancements, and the use of care and caution when interpreting the metrics produced by cited reference enhanced databases, especially those created on the basis of the idea of autonomous citation indexing.
Context
Microsoft has been trying for five years to compete with Google Scholar and some other academic search engines and cited reference enhanced traditional databases. It entered the game rather late, in 1996 ([3] Carlson, 2006), and its first efforts were disheartening. It changed the name and URL of its initial Windows Live Academic (WLA) service to Live Search Academic (LSA) but there was no sign of improvement as illustrated in a detailed review after the first year of its struggle ([10] Jacsó, 2008).
Microsoft made the right decision to scrap this substandard project (along with its book scanning efforts) after nearly three years even though the disciplinary focus (computer and information science) was an obviously appealing disciplinary area for the developers. In its "obituary", the New York Times ([7] Helft, 2008) reported that "Microsoft said it had digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles", and the blogosphere helped to spread this inflated...