Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)

Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) was a large-scale, free scholarly knowledge graph built and maintained by Microsoft Research — a structured dataset of publications, authors, institutions, venues, fields of study, and citation links, exposed publicly through the Microsoft Academic website and the Microsoft Academic Knowledge API. Microsoft retired the entire Microsoft Academic service, including MAG, the API, and the public website, on December 31, 2021. It is discontinued and no longer updated, queryable, or supported. Researchers, developers, and CRIS/discovery-tool integrations that still reference MAG are being pointed to its acknowledged open successor, OpenAlex.

What made a resource “part of MAG”

Operationally, MAG was defined by three things: (1) it was Microsoft’s own entity-resolved graph, built by mining the web (via Bing’s crawl) and academic publisher feeds rather than being contributed directly by publishers or authors; (2) it organized records into a fixed schema of entity types — Papers, Authors, Affiliations, Venues (journals/conferences), and a machine-generated Fields of Study taxonomy — connected by citation and authorship edges; and (3) it was distributed both as a queryable API/website and as periodic bulk data dumps researchers could download for bibliometric analysis. A dataset or tool is correctly described as “using MAG” only if it draws on that specific Microsoft-built graph and schema, not merely “an academic search index” in general.

Why Microsoft discontinued it

Microsoft announced the retirement of Microsoft Academic Graph and the broader Microsoft Academic service in May 2021, with an effective shutdown date of December 31, 2021. Microsoft’s own stated rationale was that the project had achieved its original research goals around demonstrating large-scale, AI-driven academic knowledge extraction, and that the open-scholarly-infrastructure ecosystem — including the newly forming OpenAlex — had matured enough to carry the mission forward as community-governed, non-proprietary infrastructure, freeing Microsoft to redirect the underlying AI research effort elsewhere.

What replaced it: OpenAlex

OpenAlex, built and maintained by the nonprofit OurResearch, launched in January 2022 explicitly as MAG’s successor: it incorporated Microsoft’s final MAG data dump as a starting corpus (excluding patent records) and adopted a broadly similar entity-graph structure, then continued growing and re-indexing independently under an open, CC0-licensed model. OpenAlex is not a Microsoft product and is not simply “MAG under a new name” — coverage, entity IDs, and the classification system (OpenAlex’s Topics have since superseded the original MAG-derived Concepts field) have all diverged substantially since 2022. Anyone citing MAG-derived statistics, coverage figures, or IDs in current work should treat those numbers as historical (pre-2022) and re-derive them from OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, or another actively maintained source rather than assuming MAG figures still hold.

If you still have a live dependency on MAG

• API integrations built against the Microsoft Academic Knowledge API stopped working when the API was shut off at the end of 2021; there is no way to reactivate it. Migrate to the OpenAlex API or another current provider such as Google Scholar-adjacent tooling, OpenAIRE Graph (for European/CRIS-sourced coverage), or Semantic Scholar’s API.
• Bulk MAG data dumps some institutions downloaded before shutdown may still exist in local archives, but they represent a frozen, non-updating snapshot as of late 2021 and should not be treated as current.
• Citations to MAG in methods sections or documentation from papers published before 2022 remain historically accurate as a description of the source used at the time; they don’t need to be “corrected,” but any live tool or pipeline still depending on MAG functionally does need to be migrated.

Frequently asked questions

Is Microsoft Academic Graph still available?

No. The website, the public API, and MAG’s underlying data updates all stopped on December 31, 2021. No official channel for querying MAG currently exists.

Is OpenAlex the same as Microsoft Academic Graph?

No, though it is the direct successor. OpenAlex started from a copy of the final MAG dataset in January 2022 but is independently built, maintained, and governed by the nonprofit OurResearch, and its coverage and schema have since diverged from MAG’s frozen 2021 snapshot.

Can I still download the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset?

Microsoft does not currently distribute new MAG dumps. Any copy in circulation is whatever institutions or researchers archived before the December 2021 shutdown, and it will not reflect anything published since.

What should I cite instead of MAG in a current methods section or tool description?

For most use cases formerly served by MAG — large-scale, open, bulk-downloadable scholarly metadata — OpenAlex is the standard current reference. Depending on the specific need, OpenAIRE Graph or Semantic Scholar may be more appropriate for European-CRIS-sourced or citation-context-heavy use cases respectively.