Microsoft Academic Graph Now Available For Download

Last year, Microsoft announced that Academic Search project was evolving from a research project into full-scale production powered by Bing. In addition to integrating scholarly publications directly into Bing search results and Cortana’s notification system, they are now taking full advantage of Bing’s capacity to crawl the web and generate structured information from unstructured text. Microsoft today announced the the release of a snapshot of this graph for the research community, in an effort to jumpstart new avenues of research at web scale. The Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) can be used immediately. The data is stored as a set of text files, one for each entity in the graph, and one for each relationship type between the entities (paper-paper citations, author-paper, paper-topic and so forth).

The Microsoft Academic Graph is a heterogeneous graph containing scientific publication records, citation relationships between those publications, as well as authors, institutions, journals and conference “venues” and fields of study. This data is available as a set of zipped text files stored in Microsoft Azure blob storage and available via HTTP. The file size is ~37GB.

Also researchers can apply for an Azure for Research award to support their research efforts. Simply include #academicgraph in your award submission—the next deadline is August 15, 2015.