Can Microsoft Academic assess the early citation impact of in-press articles? A multi-discipline exploratory analysis.

Many journals post accepted articles online before they are formallypublished in an issue. Early citation impact evidence for these articles couldbe helpful for timely research evaluation and to identify potentially importantarticles that quickly attract many citations. This article investigates whetherMicrosoft Academic can help with this task. For over 65,000 Scopus in-pressarticles from 2016 and 2017 across 26 fields, Microsoft Academic found 2-5times as many citations as Scopus, depending on year and field. From manualchecks of 1,122 Microsoft Academic citations not found in Scopus, MicrosoftAcademic's citation indexing was faster but not much wider than Scopus forjournals. It achieved this by associating citations to preprints with theirsubsequent in-press versions and by extracting citations from in-pressarticles. In some fields its coverage of scholarly digital libraries, such asarXiv.org, was also an advantage. Thus, Microsoft Academic seems to be a morecomprehensive automatic source of citation counts for in-press articles thanScopus.