Lens Scholarly Search, a new tool to search across patents and citations at the cutting-edge of innovative science and engineering. Looks great, with nice clean design and fast response. It’s one of the new wave of citation search tools.
It’s public, and can be used without an account sign-in, unlike Sparrho (which claims 60m across both citations and patents).
I can’t see any way to filter the search results for “… and has link to free public full-text”. But I guess if you need a focussed tool like this, then your innovative project has the funding to access everything that you need to read.
Searches can be embedded in URLs, as can the ‘search by date’ setting. Which means that saving a set of bookmarks would give you a usefully quick way of regularly horizon-scanning across the developed applications and commercialisation of a specific research topic. I don’t see that Lens.org has the capability to offer a RSS alerts-type feed, based on keywords, though it looks like it may do if you sign up for an account. Of course, on highly sensitive projects, such an account has dangers — in that you don’t know if competitor nations might be sniffing at or profiling your search-trail in some way.
