When you're doing a structured literature search chances are you're using one of the main commercial scholarly search engines like Scopus, "Web of Science", or Google Scholar. These tools are often expensive, and often not intuitive to use. Unfortunately, you didn't have much of a choice in the past.

Recently free and open alternatives have been catching up with these juggernauts. Not just databases like OpenAlex or Crossref, but also structured search engines like Semantic Scholar or the topic of this post: The Lens.

The Lens

lens.org

A structured search engine for scholarly works built on top of open databases

Modern interface with advanced search options, citation tracking, custom display of results and analysis, and more

Also has one of the largest patent databases, which is highly interlinked with scholarly publications

Free to use, run by a non-profit organisation

Uses data from OpenAlex, Microsoft Academic, PubMed, Crossref

This post will be updated later to include more details

Looking for an overview of search engines and scholarly databases? Check out the main list of information tools on this site!