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About The Lens
The Lens lets you search the world's patents and scholarly works in one place. Results can be filtered and explored through graphical analysis, such as charts of patent records binned by publication and filing dates, and a classification explorer.
Users can build collections, publish and share them, and follow searches. An API is available. The service describes itself as an open digital public good with a focus on user privacy, and offers subscriptions for some uses.
Strengths
- Patents and scholarly works in one search
- Built-in charts and analysis of results
- Shareable collections
- API access
Limitations
- Analysis of very large result sets can time out
- Some features require a subscription
Details
- Pricing
- FreemiumFree to search, with paid subscriptions offered for some features.
- License
- Proprietary
- Developer
- The Lens
- Platforms
- Web
- How it runs
- Web application
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- No
- Best suited for
- Researchers and analysts searching patents alongside academic literature
- Categories
- Learning tools, AI research
- Last verified
- Added
- Sources
Alternatives to The Lens
Compare allSoftware that can replace The Lens for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
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 necessarily 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.
