APIs and Datasets for Scholarly and Patent Information: Lens.org

The Lens is a freely available database that merges and links diverse scholarly publication and patent information, including the citations of scholarly works within patent documents, into a single discovery and analysis platform. You can use the basic search without registering, but after registering you will also have access to a number of other tools, including for visual analysis and customized dashboarding of your search results, and be able to add information about your own publication authorship and patent inventorship history to your ORCID record.

As part of KAUST's Institutional Toolkit subscription, all KAUST users are eligible to make use of the Lens's Scholarly and Patent APIs, which provide programmatic access to all patent and scholarly works records in JSON output format. You can request access by selecting the "Request API Access" button under the "ITK USER ACCESS / Institutional User API Access" section of the subscription page for the appropriate API. Make sure that your account is registered with your KAUST email address before making your request so that your request is covered by KAUST's subscription. Your request will normally be approved within one working day and you will then be able to generate an API token from the Subscriptions area of your account.

A quick way to try out the APIs and test queries is through the Swagger UI. The full documentation of the APIs also provides helpful example queries and code samples. Your request rate will be limited as below:

A guide to how to create an API access token, along with a Jupyter Notebook demonstrating how to work with the Lens Scholarly API in Python, is available at: https://github.com/kaust-library/lens_api_dataset

If you require a higher volume of requests for your project, or have other issues or questions, please contact library@kaust.edu.sa .