The Lens

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The Lens

Type of site	Patent Search Service
Available in	Multilingual
Owner	Cambia
URL	The Lens
Commercial	Not for profit
Registration	No
Launched	2000
Current status	Active

The Lens, formerly called Patent Lens, is a free searcheable online patent and scholarly literature database, provided by Cambia, an Australia-based non-profit organization. The Lens has been hailed as the “most comprehensive scholarly literature database, that exceeds in its width and depth two leading commercial databases (Web of Science and Scopus) combined”.^[1] The Lens is an agglomeration database, that takes bibliometric data from other databases (such as Crossref, PubMed, Microsoft Academic and Open Alex ) and combines them into one, deduplicated (albeit not perfectly) and with a powerful unified search syntax.

Launched in 2000 as the Patent Lens, over the years, thanks to grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2000–2004, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2011, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2012, Wellcome Trust in 2018, as well as from the Lemelson Foundation it added journal articles, conference papers, reports, books and other types of scholarly literature,^[2][3][1] and evolved into a comprehensive database with over 225+ million scholarly works, 127+ million global patent records, and more than 370 million biological sequences, all with unprecedentedly rich metadata (including citations).^[4]

In 2013, the Patent Lens was officially replaced with Cambia's new site The Lens.^{[citation needed]}