[3] Microsoft Academic gained prominence because it profiled authors, organizations, keywords, and journals[4] and made the dataset available as open data, in contrast to Google Scholar.

[12] Thanks to the open data license, the Microsoft Academic dataset was merged into OpenAlex.

[13] The Academic Knowledge API offered information retrieval from the underlying database using REST endpoints for advanced research purposes.

[16] The technology uses machine learning, semantic inference and knowledge discovery from sources crawled and indexed by the Bing search engine.

[18] The platform was developed in 2009 of the Microsoft Research branch in Asia and the project was headed by Zaiqing Nie.