We are excited to announce the release of Lens 6.0.0, with a new homepage, skin design and improved search functionality.
Improvements/Changes:
- This release includes a new homepage that better demonstrates The Lens capabilities. In the sidebar, you can browse the contents of both scholarly and patent datasets and the supplementary data currently available. It also includes new simplified search entry points to immediately launch a patent or scholarly search.
- All internal pages across the site have received a new skin and improved page layouts for a more intuitive and consistent experience.
- Auto-suggest has been added to 12 scholar and 4 patent fields. Now any time you are typing in the name of an author, institution, inventor or applicant and see a spinning loading icon in the structured search or search results pages, it means suggestions are being retrieved. We are actively working to improve the quality of these suggestions.
- The Structured Search and Query Editor has benefited from various updates and improved integration which makes creating new searches or editing an existing search a much simpler experience
Additional minor changes:
- Add link shortener for url sharing
- Add warning about GRID data to Institution Country facet
- Add canned counts for all scholar facets and flags (e.g. 63M Authors, 25.5M Open Access, etc)
- Add tooltips for top 10 funders. e.g. NHLBI NIH HHS = National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
- Updated Font Awesome Library from V4 to V5
- Add line chart dashed line for previous two years to represent incomplete data
- Improve scholar facet "choose more" explorer. No longer limited to top 1000 facet values instead all facet values of a result set can now be searched.
- Improve feature tours content
- Improve layout of Structured Search forms and ORCID author search
- Improve collection management behaviour for unauthenticated users
- Improve filters search input auto-focus behaviour
Fixes:
- Fix Title+Abstract+Claims query grouping (user's feedback)
- Fix patent analysis cited and sequence bar chart labels
- Fix searching by DOI
- Fix logo cache being invalidated every UI release
Data Improvements/Alerts:
- A few weeks ago, a Lens user reported an error in the labelling of a disclosed patent sequence in a Japanese patent document. Upon investigating, we found discrepancy in the sequence listing data available at JPO website and DDBJ database. We sought clarification from the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and we received this message: "You can access the original sequence listing data which applicants submitted to JPO in their application process at [ https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/web/all/top/BTmTopEnglishPage ]. On the other hand, the sequence listing data provided to the DDBJ are the data stored in the JPO’s system for Examiner’s search." We will post all the details about these issues in the Japan dossier folder in PatSeq Data in the next release.
- With this release we have officially ended support for Internet Explorer. We still fully support Microsoft Edge, along with all other modern and standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera).
Interested in helping us improve?
We thank the volunteers who are actively engaged and helping us at present and if you are an engineer who loves challenges in data disambiguation or improving the overall quality of the Lens data, please contact us. There are several technical and data challenges that we are working on and you may be able to provide an important contribution to help make the Lens an even better a public resource, please see https://about.lens.org/for-developers/ for more details.
As we continue scaling up the Lens services, we welcome your feedback. If you would like to share a tutorial/blog about your use of the Lens, please let us know. And because we have recently upgraded many of the apps, please make sure you are using the latest updated version of your browser. If you need guidance to navigate the Lens and utilise its many different features, please visit our Support Center to check out the latest tutorials or contact us at support@lens.org with your queries/comments
