Release 6.2.0

27 June 2019 by Aaron Ballagh in Featured, Notices, Release Notes

Release 6.2.0
New API & Data facility, updated Terms of Use, Scholarly APIv1.0, improved open access and more

Introducing the new API & Data facility!

New API & Data facility, updated Terms of Use, Scholarly APIv1.0, improved open access and more improved Lens features!!

We are pleased to present the Lens API & Data facility, providing access to the new Lens Scholarly APIv1.0 and PatSeq Bulk Download with additional API & Data options coming in the near future. The new Lens scholarly APIv1.0 provides access to the full corpus of Lens scholarly works using the flexibility and convenience of a REST API. The versioned API allows you to combine and perform several types of search operations to programmatically retrieve results. Check out the API documentation which provides guidelines for getting you started and details the request/response schema with examples of supported query types and code snippets based on beta testing by our pilot users. A Swagger UI is also provided for quick and easy query development.

N.B. We are no longer supporting Internet Explorer, all other modern and standards compliant browsers are still supported (e.g. Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Safari, Opera).

Improvements/Changes:

  • Launched Lens Scholarly APIv1.0
    • Versioned REST API providing access to the full corpus of scholarly works
    • Detailed API documentation with examples and issue tracking and
    • Swagger UI providing quick and easy query development
    • Added API & Data facility for managing API and PatSeq bulk download tokens, request your access here.
  • Custom facet grouping is now available in simple bar charts and time series charts. In the chart settings, this feature allows you to define your own custom groupings of entities in the search results and create a chart that aggregates the counts of scholarly works for the entities in each group.
  • Added a check-box option to the chart settings for restricting charts to display only the filtered values.
  • Queries and filters are now saved as part of a saved dashboard configuration.

Using the custom facet grouping to create publisher groupings.

Additional minor changes:

New open access box format with additional open access sources

  • Improved mobile UX and responsive site behaviour
  • Added Choose “More” option to facets in the search sidebar on the homepage
  • Added release note notification banner to the homepage
  • Improved the handling and display of open access sources and locations displayed in the open access box on individual scholarly work pages

Fixes:

  • Fixed institution country word cloud preset
  • Fixed patent pub key field errors (user feedback)
  • Fixed JSON export (user feedback)
  • Fixed the handling of dirty-state filters in the choose “More” dialogue in the filters
  • Fixed charts and labels in the analysis preview

Data Improvements/Alerts:

  • We have improved the accuracy and scope of our open access data:
    • Open access status is now determined using a combination of Unpaywall data, the DOAJ journal list (where the work is published after the journal DOAJ listing date), CORE full text availability or listing in PubMed Central.
    • Unpaywall data has been updated using the latest public bulk data release (19-April-2019)
  • Upgraded scholarly store schema to version 3.0 and Elasticsearch index to version 7.1
  • Added last-updated date to the dataset info on the structured search pages for patents and scholarly works
  • With this release our Terms of Use have been updated, please see our policies for more details

Interested in helping us improve?

  • We are grateful to all those who tested the beta version of the Lens scholarly API and sent us comments and/or feedback. We also appreciate many users and volunteers who have been actively engaged in helping us improve and maintain this public resource. There are many technical and data challenges that we are working on so if you are interested in helping, please see https://about.lens.org/for-developers/ for more details.
  • While we describe several supported query types in the Scholarly API documentation,  the listed examples may still not cover all scenarios that you envision.  If there are other useful scenarios to you, please let us know and we will continue to update the documentation and functionality based on your feedback.  We will use your input to guide development and improve the API. Please take our survey to send us more technical feedback on this API version.

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.