Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) is updated weekly to keep up with the pace of scientific discoveries and technology advances. Just a few months ago, in our April 20, 2018 blog, we disclosed that the graph contained more than 173 million articles. As of July 31, 2018, that number had risen to more than 176 million. We update these numbers every time the graph is uploaded online.
Starting in August 2018, you’ll see a significant jump in the number of publications indexed in MAG, to more than 200 million. This is due to our revised approach for citing patents.
Starting now, MAG will provide improved patent coverage thanks to a partnership with domain expert Lens.org. Lens.org is a public benefit company spun out from Cambia and the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. The Lens–including its predecessor, Patent Lens–has been a free, open and global full text patent search site for over 18 years, serving over 110M patent records from more than 100 jurisdictions. Their vision of mapping out the influence of academic literature so as to turn science into social outcomes is well articulated in the two articles published in Nature (2017) and Nature Biotechnology (2018). With the domain expertise from Lens.org, we are able to provide a more holistic account of scientific discoveries as communicated through patents. Patents have always been included as publications in MAG. Like academic papers, patents have abstracts, authors (who are often the inventors, but usually their patent attorneys), and affiliations (often the institution or assignee of a patent). Patents cite other patents and scholarly articles, and such citations are used to assess impacts of the cited work for ranking purposes. Indeed, many inventions are published both in the form of a patent disclosure and a scholarly paper.
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