Alternatives to The Lens
A search and analysis platform for patents and scholarly literature, with charts and collections. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
The Lens
A search and analysis platform for patents and scholarly literature, with charts and collections.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as The Lens.
Google Scholar
Google's free search engine for scholarly articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
Google Scholar is free with broad coverage including case law, alerts and author profiles, but it does not search patents or provide built-in charts and API access.
Semantic Scholar
A free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature covering papers from all fields of science.
Semantic Scholar is a free AI-powered search over more than 238 million papers with a public API, but it covers scientific literature only, without patents or result charts.
Paper Digest
A web platform that uses AI to search, review, read and write about academic research papers.
Paper Digest also searches across papers, patents, grants and people, adding AI literature review, question answering and daily alerts, though full pricing is unclear.
CORE
A search engine and database aggregating hundreds of millions of open access research papers.
CORE is a free not-for-profit aggregator of open access papers with full text, APIs and datasets, but it excludes patents and non-open-access content.
Open Knowledge Maps
A nonprofit visual search engine that builds topic maps of research literature.
Open Knowledge Maps is free and nonprofit, presenting research outputs including datasets and software as visual topic maps, but without patents or collection features.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Scite
An AI research tool that answers questions from scholarly articles and shows how claims are cited.
Consensus
An AI search engine for peer-reviewed literature that gives evidence-based answers drawn from papers.
Litmaps
A literature review tool that maps citation networks around seed papers to find related research.
ResearchRabbit
A web tool for literature reviews that finds related papers and builds citation maps.
Inciteful
A free web tool that uses citation graphs to find related academic papers and connect two papers.
Elicit
An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.
