Important
All Microsoft Academic Services have been officially retired as of December 31st, 2021. We are currently retaining original documentation as-is for educational use, however all information about signing up for services is no longer valid, and support and service (API) links will not function.
Project Academic Knowledge
Welcome to Project Academic Knowledge. With this service, you will be able to interpret user queries for academic intent and retrieve rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). The MAG knowledge base is a web-scale heterogeneous entity graph comprised of entities that model scholarly activities: field of study, author, institution, paper, venue, and event.
The MAG data is mined from the Bing web index as well as an in-house knowledge base from Bing. As a result of on-going Bing indexing, this API will contain fresh information from the Web following discovery and indexing by Bing. Based on this dataset, the Academic Knowledge APIs enables a knowledge-driven, interactive dialog that seamlessly combines reactive search with proactive suggestion experiences, rich research paper graph search results, and histogram distributions of the attribute values for a set of papers and related entities.
For more information on the Microsoft Academic Graph, see https://aka.ms/academicgraph.
Features
The Project Academic Knowledge consists of four related REST methods:
- interpret – Interprets a natural language user query string. Returns annotated interpretations to enable rich search-box auto-completion experiences that anticipate what the user is typing
- evaluate – Evaluates a query expression and returns Academic Knowledge entity results
- calchistogram – Calculates a histogram of the distribution of attribute values for the academic entities returned by a query expression, such as the distribution of citations by year for a given author
- similarity - Calculates the cosine similarity between two strings
Used together, these API methods allow you to create a rich semantic search experience. Given a user query string, the interpret method provides you with an annotated version of the query and a structured query expression, while optionally completing the user’s query based on the semantics of the underlying academic data. For example, if a user types the string latent s, the interpret method can provide a set of ranked interpretations, suggesting that the user might be searching for the field of study latent semantic analysis, the paper latent structure analysis, or other entity expressions starting with latent s. This information can be used to quickly guide the user to the desired search results.
The evaluate method can be used to retrieve a set of matching paper entities from the academic knowledge base, and the calchistogram method can be used to calculate the distribution of attribute values for a set of paper entities which can be used to further filter the search results.
Getting Started
Please see the subtopics at the left for detailed documentation. Note that to improve the readability of the examples, the REST API calls contain characters (such as spaces) that have not been URL-encoded. Your code will need to apply the appropriate URL-encodings.