Lens.org Scholarly and Patent API

Overview

Lens.org provides unified access to 300M+ scholarly articles and 150M+ patent records with cross-linkage between them. Uniquely, Lens connects academic research to patent citations, enabling innovation tracking and prior art discovery. The API offers full-text search, citation analysis, and patent-paper linkage. Free for non-commercial use with registration (up to 1,000 requests/day).

Authentication

# Register at https://www.lens.org/lens/user/subscriptions
# API token provided in your account settings
# Include in header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN

API Endpoints

Scholarly Search

# POST-based search
curl -X POST "https://api.lens.org/scholarly/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LENS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": {
      "match": {"field_of_study": "machine learning"}
    },
    "size": 20,
    "from": 0,
    "sort": [{"year_published": "desc"}]
  }'

# Boolean query
curl -X POST "https://api.lens.org/scholarly/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LENS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": {
      "bool": {
        "must": [
          {"match": {"title": "transformer"}},
          {"range": {"year_published": {"gte": 2023}}}
        ],
        "should": [
          {"match": {"abstract": "attention mechanism"}}
        ]
      }
    },
    "size": 25
  }'

Patent Search

curl -X POST "https://api.lens.org/patent/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LENS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": {
      "bool": {
        "must": [
          {"match": {"title": "neural network"}},
          {"term": {"jurisdiction": "US"}}
        ]
      }
    },
    "size": 20
  }'

Scholarly Fields

Field	Description	Type
title