In the Lens, you can search millions of scholarly records, facet or filter by their granular metadata and view the joins with the patent dataset. The joins are reversible as they would enable you to link a patent search result to the cited scholarly works (articles, conference papers, books, etc that are cited in the global patent literature) and vice versa, link any scholarly search results to citing patents (patents applied for or granted or search reports that disclose the scholarly works).
Currently, the Lens hosts and serves over 200 million scholarly records, compiled and harmonised from Microsoft Academic, PubMed and Crossref, enhanced with UnPaywall open access information. The full scholarly graph is provided for the first time as an open public resource.
Location
Lens Home Page
On the top left of the Lens homepage is a search bar for the scholarly search. Here you can enter your search text to perform the scholarly search.
Search Result Page
On the top of the search result page you can find the search bar where you can enter your search text to perform the scholarly search. Below the search text bar, you can also find a button to edit your search.
Dropdown Search Menu
You can always start the new scholarly search by clicking on the “New Scholar Search” option available on the dropdown search menu in the result list page.
Menu Bar
You can always start a new search by clicking on the “Scholarly Work” button available on “Our Apps” in the menu bar of every Page of the Lens.
How to Use
Search Bar
Searching on The Lens is as easy as typing in a keyword scholarly search and clicking the “Search” button. Start your search by typing a keyword in the search bar on the Lens home page or the scholarly search page. Scholarly Search uses the text in the search bar, even if from an existing search (filters are dropped).
Structured Search
Alternatively, you can use “Structured Search” that is effectively an assisted version of a normal search but tries to parse and modify it. The Structured Search is another way to refine your search from the very start and gives you unique options for searching for text within specific fields of each document. Using the Structured Search tools, you can create specific search queries, filtering by date range, identifier type and publication type. The flags section additionally contains high level filters like “Open Access”, “Has abstract”, “Has Funding” and many more. When searching on The Lens, we query your search results against our vast database of more than 200 million scholarly records. Results are sorted by default using their relevance. After your initial search you can refine your parameters using the various faceted filters available to you. The query details pane displays a summary of your search, filters and results. You can remove unwanted filters here. Read more about Scholarly Structured Search.
Search with Query Text Editor
Scholar search can be performed by typing the Boolean or keyword query typed into the search input box in the query text editor tab in the scholarly search page. Once you start typing your Boolean query in the editor fields will be suggested by the Lens. There is no enforced limit on the query length, however queries are URL-based, which are typically limited to ~2000 characters (browser dependent). You can use following keyboard shortcuts while searching:
- Ctrl + Space – autocomplete top suggested field
- Ctrl + Enter – Validate query
- Ctrl + Enter – Submit validated query
For more information on creating Boolean queries, see our Boolean Logic tutorial and Boolean Operators Tutorial.
Apply Filters
You can filter your findings by including or excluding various attributes. Filters can be used in Lens to narrow down the search results or to start a search. The filter panel appears throughout the Lens on the left-hand side of the screen and can be collapsed when not in use. The filter pane shows the top faceted values for scholarly metadata. Explore the values available by expanding or collapsing relevant selections. Click a value to restrict your results to only documents matching that filter. Click a second time to exclude values. Each filter can be selected and then activated by hitting the “refine” button. You will then see a red box over each filter tab, showing you how many active filters you have in that tab. You can use the “clear” button to remove filters, or simply make a new search to start again from scratch. A new search can be made at any time by clicking the down arrow next to the Refine button. All filtering options alter the number of documents included in your results. The query details pane displays a summary of filters from where you can remove unwanted filters.
Edit Search
Clicking on the “Edit Search” button below the search text bar on each scholarly search result page allows you to edit and refine your search to drill down into the data to get more precise result sets. In the search box you can see your current search terms. If you would like to modify these terms you can simply edit this text and hit the search button. You can also edit your search by limiting your search terms to specific sections of documents which is also a structured search. Hold CTRL/CMD to select multiple options from the auto-suggest list. Change the predicate to OR if results for all the options selected are wanted.
Sort Search
Sorting the search will change the order results are shown to you in the result list page but will not alter the number of results in the search. By default, sorting is done by relevance ranking. It is determined through advanced algorithms which establish which documents are the most relevant given your search terms, parameters and filters. Relevance is not an indicator of the document’s quality or importance, but rather is a measure of how well the document matches your search. Different sorting parameters can be changed on the results page by clicking on the sort button available on the scholarly works toolbar. The currently selected sorting parameter is shown with a blue arrow. You can sort results by the following column headings:
- Relevance
- Scholarly Citation
- Citing Patents
- Date Published
- Source Title