Lots of folks online are upset at the news that Microsoft is planning plan to shut down its Microsoft Academic Search at the end of 2021. As one blogger put it, “it provides/provided better results than Google Scholar along with a number of features GS doesn’t provide at all” and has been “wonderful and powerful.”
It’s not that there aren’t other services – there are a number of other academic research search tools, many of them free. Some include bibliographic information/direct links to open access articles as well as bibliographic info about paywalled materials. Others, provide material only about open access content. These include:
There’s also alerting services from Semantic Scholar offers (free).
I rely heavily on these services, both to find resources to add to my list of virtual volunteering-related research on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki and to find out who might be quoting my book, The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, or any of my other research or academic work, in their own research. And without a university account, I don’t have access to most academic research journals – I can read only the summary of articles on the aforementioned services.
Which of these services – or some other – is your favorite? Will the Microsoft change affect you and, if so, how?