Preview Version of the New Microsoft Academic Search Engine is Now Online, API Also Available

UPDATE March 1, 2016 A Few Questions About the New Preview Version of Microsoft Academic in MSFT FAQ
From the FAQ:

This new service puts a knowledge driven, semantic inference based search and recommendation framework front and center. In addition, a new data structure and graph engine have been developed to facilitate the real-time intent recognition and knowledge serving. One illustrating feature is semantic query suggestions that identify authors, topics, journals, conferences, etc., as you type and offer ways to refine your search based on the data in the underlying academic knowledge graph. You can also refine your results using the filters on the search results page. Since we are built on top of Bing’s web crawling infrastructure, we are able to discover and index new academic papers in a more scalable manner. We now have over 160 million entities (including 120 million publications) and billions of relationships in the Microsoft Academic Graph and growing!
We are also adopting an open approach in developing the service, and we invite community participation.

Read the Complete FAQ
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After several years of providing no updates and little news, a preview of a new version of the once promising Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) has been released. The service is now officially named Microsoft Academic.
More after we’ve spent some time with MAS and hopefully learn more from MSFT. At the moment the preview version contains no documentation. This introductory page from Microsoft uses the slogan, “Research more, Search Less.”

Microsoft Academic Search contains both citations (with links to publisher portals) and, if available, links to full text versions available on the open web.
An API is also available and is one of a number of preview APIs that come from Microsoft’s Project Oxford.
See Also: Microsoft Academic on Twitter
On a Related Note…
Other Web-Based Academic Search Engine Items of Note From 2015
1. Say Hello to Semantic Scholar Launching Today From the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)
Launched in November 2015.
2. BASE and SHARE Projects
BASE is a wonderful academic search tool (free) out of Germany. SHARE is a project that ARL is leading. Also, worth noting is news from December 2015 that content from BASE is being added to EBSCO Discovery Service.

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, EBSCO, Journal Articles, News, Publishing