Microsoft Academic: A multidisciplinary comparison of citation counts with Scopus and Mendeley for 29 journals

TL;DR

This study systematically compares citation counts from Microsoft Academic, Scopus, and Mendeley across 29 journals, revealing Microsoft Academic's citation counts are slightly higher than Scopus but lower than Mendeley, with variations influenced by disciplinary practices.

Contribution

It provides the largest and most systematic analysis to date of citation count differences across these platforms for a diverse set of journals.

Findings

Microsoft Academic cites 6% more than Scopus overall

Microsoft Academic cites 51% more than Scopus in the current year

Microsoft Academic has 59% fewer citations than Mendeley overall

Abstract

Microsoft Academic is a free citation index that allows large scale data collection. This combination makes it useful for scientometric research. Previous studies have found that its citation counts tend to be slightly larger than those of Scopus but smaller than Google Scholar, with disciplinary variations. This study reports the largest and most systematic analysis so far, of 172,752 articles in 29 large journals chosen from different specialisms. From Scopus citation counts, Microsoft Academic citation counts and Mendeley reader counts for articles published 2007-2017, Microsoft Academic found a slightly more (6%) citations than Scopus overall and especially for the current year (51%). It found fewer citations than Mendeley readers overall (59%), and only 7% as many for the current year. Differences between journals were probably due to field preprint sharing cultures or journal policies rather than broad disciplinary differences.