Comparison of metadata with relevance for bibliometrics between Microsoft Academic Graph and OpenAlex until 2020

Abstract: Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) has been studied a lot concerning its suitability for bibliometric evaluations. In May 2021, it was announced that it would retire on December 31, 2021. Soon after that, the non-profit organization OurResearch, aiming at providing 'a fully open catalog of the global research system', announced they would preserve and incorporate the last full MAG corpus, only excluding patent data, and to continue and hopefully improve it. After the launch of OpenAlex in January 2022, it is of interest to know if the usefulness of the MAG data is preserved or even improved in OpenAlex. To this end, we compared metadata that are relevant for bibliometric analyses (in particular field and time normalization of citations) of MAG and OpenAlex: - the coverage of documents over the years, - the agreement of bibliographic data, - the numbers of references of each document, - the kind and distribution of document types, - the distribution and relation of subject classifications.