How can researchers spend less time on data entry and more time on discovery? That was the central question of our latest Enabling Value webinar, where we sat down with The Lens’s Mark Garlinghouse, Director of Business Development, and Aaron Ballagh, Director of Product (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8040-7788).
The Lens is a major player in open knowledge, serving as a bridge between millions of scholarly records and research outputs, including global patent data. By integrating with ORCID, they’ve created a “set-and-forget” ecosystem that ensures researchers get full credit for their entire body of work—including the innovations that happen outside of traditional journals.
The Lens Profile, a powerful tool for researchers
The core of the discussion was The Lens Profile, a powerful tool that allows researchers to automatically enhance and maintain their ORCID records. Because The Lens aggregates data from over 100 major sources, such as Crossref and PubMed, it can identify works that might be missing from a standard ORCID profile.
Giving credit to innovators with patent metadata
While many tools handle scholarly papers, The Lens is a leader in tracking innovation. As many researchers hold patents that are often siloed separately from their academic citations, the webinar demonstrated how to integrate patent data directly into an ORCID record. This ensures that your inventions are credited alongside your research, providing a holistic view of your societal impact to funders and employers.
Using the bulk claim wizard for syncing in seconds
One of the most popular features showcased by The Lens team was the bulk claim wizard. This wizard will launch a guided process to find more of your works that are not yet associated with your ORCID record. Instead of adding works one by one, researchers can use The Lens to:
- Identify missing publications in seconds
- Sync them to their ORCID record in a single batch, and
- Enable auto-updates so that future works are captured without manual intervention.
How The Lens maps global innovation to help research administrators
While a standard search engine can provide a list of results, The Lens provides users with a PID (persistent identifier) graph. In this way, The Lens acts as a force multiplier because it automatically maps global innovation onto specific researcher profiles. So instead of spending time gathering and analyzing data that is cost-prohibitive or technically impossible to compile manually, The Lens enables research administrators to spend less time gathering data and more of their time deciding what the insights mean for their institution’s strategy. By encouraging researchers to use Lens Profiles, institutions can:
- Reduce Administrative Burden: Less time spent chasing researchers for publication lists and other scholarly activities.
- Improve Data Quality: More accurate, validated data for internal reporting and national assessments, such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, or the Excellence in Research for Australia.
Next steps to promote interoperability and profile discovery
To use The Lens to improve your ORCID record, visit Lens.org to link your ORCID and see what works you might be missing. While you’re there, check out the new Anatomy of a Profile section on their support page, to see how your scholarly and patent data can live together in one place. If you couldn’t make the live session, you can watch the full recording here!
