Content originally published on data180.com. Learn more about Interfolio’s acquisition of Data180 here.

Researchers now have another tool available to assist them with their research needs. The new Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), recently released by Microsoft Research, allows researchers to easily search millions of research papers that have been identified by Microsoft Academic Search (MAS), and in return quickly find data that is relevant to their work.

Users can search for information based upon the following variables:

  • Field of study
  • Author
  • Institution
  • Paper
  • Venue
  • Event

For instance, if a researcher is looking for information on a specific field of study and knows the author’s and/or related institution’s name, MAG can identify the research papers that are available based on those variables.

The data in MAG is stored as a set of zipped text files in the Microsoft Azure cloud service, or the files can also be downloaded. There is a text file for each entity in the graph, and a text file for each relationship type between the entities (paper-paper citations, author-paper, paper-topic, etc.).

MAS is part of Microsoft Research, the research division of Microsoft, and was recently integrated with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Researchers can use Bing to search academic domains for research papers, and MAG then provides a snapshot of this data.

Microsoft Research is encouraging researchers using MAG to apply for an Azure for Research Award to support their research efforts.

For more information on MAG and the Azure for Research Award, visit http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mag/.

Content originally published on data180.com. Learn more about Interfolio’s acquisition of Data180 here.