Monday 12 March 2012

Short-cited II: Microsoft Academic Research

Since my last post, my Microsoft Academic Research page has been updated in light of my editing. It seems that my initial views of over-inflation were wrong, though. Whereas Google has my h-index at +2 versus Web of Science, Microsoft has me at -2. This seems to be, at least in part, due to a lack of recent publications. My 2012 papers are missing, for example, which makes me wonder how many other papers (and therefore citations) are missing.

The site does seem to have some nice features but, because the underlying data seems to be unreliable, I'm not convinced that they're (currently) that useful. The co-authors listing, for example, has one of my regular collaborators Norman Davey twice, presumably because he moved institutions. Unfortunately, the Citation Graph does not work on an iPad, so I'm not sure if this makes up for any of the mess.

Similarly, the organisation comparison function seems interesting but does it really mean anything if you cannot trust it? I guess that kind of sums up bibliometrics all round, though.

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