Research impact & bibliometrics · Cambia

The Lens

Free global platform linking scholarly literature with patent data for research, innovation and IP analysis.

The Lens is built and run by Cambia, an Australian nonprofit, and is free to use for individuals, funded through philanthropic and institutional support plus paid subscriptions for high-volume institutional analytics. Its distinguishing feature is combining scholarly literature search with global patent data in one interface, so a user can trace how academic research connects to later patented inventions, which neither Scopus nor Web of Science does natively. PatSeq extends this into biological sequence search within patents. Individual researchers get free accounts with collaborative workspaces and institutional profiles, while its API is free for not-for-profit use and licensed commercially otherwise. It suits technology-transfer offices and innovation researchers as much as traditional bibliometricians.

At a glance

Vendor Cambia
Pricing model Free tier + paid plans
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for Innovation and technology-transfer teams who need patents and literature searched together, free of charge.

Pricing

Free for individual scholarly and patent search, funded by the nonprofit Cambia; paid institutional analytics subscriptions are quoted.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features

  • Combined scholarly literature and global patent search
  • PatSeq biological sequence search within patents
  • Scholarly-to-patent citation linking
  • Free collaborative research workspaces
  • Institutional and researcher profiles
  • Free API access for not-for-profit use

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

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