Lens

The Lens is a free scholarly search platform combining patent and academic literature with powerful analytics for research and innovation intelligence.

Overview

The Lens indexes hundreds of millions of patent documents and scholarly works in one searchable corpus, making it uniquely useful for tracking how science and invention connect. Researchers explore citation networks, organizations map their innovation portfolios, and policymakers study technology landscapes. Its analytics visualize who is citing whom and where research is heading, and collections can be saved, shared, and exported. As a public-good project, core access is free.

The free access policy makes it a staple in universities and technology transfer offices. Its analytics reveal connections between papers and patents that separate databases hide, which supports smarter investment and collaboration decisions.

Key Features

• Unified search across patents and scholarly literature
• Citation analytics and landscape visualization
• Portfolio tools for organizations and inventors
• Saved collections with sharing and export
• Free public access with institutional options
• Unified patent and scholarly search
• Citation and landscape analytics
• Portfolio tracking for organizations

Researchers build collections around questions rather than folders, then monitor them as living literature reviews. Institutional users layer in analytics for reporting, and the free core keeps collaboration open across organizations that cannot share commercial database access.

Export and API options support serious bibliometric work, while saved searches double as ongoing monitoring for technology areas. Because the underlying corpus mixes patents with scholarship, users can trace how an invention moved from paper to protection without switching databases.

Institutional dashboards support reporting to funders and research offices, and the corpus’s breadth makes cross-disciplinary discovery genuinely possible. Because access is free, international research collaborations face no licensing barriers to shared exploration.

Pricing

The Lens is free for public use; enhanced institutional services and API access are available for organizations.

Who Is It For

Researchers, technology transfer offices, and innovation teams studying the intersection of science and patents. It fits researchers and innovation teams studying science-technology connections.