scanR was launched in 2016 and there will be a new version in January 2020. This search engine can be used to explore the French higher education, research and innovation (ESRI) landscape.

Users can identify and characterize entities such as public research laboratories, public institutions and companies which actively work in a research field in France and link up scientific works and their authors and also link projects to a research theme.

scanR covers most French research and innovation open sources: the Baromètre français de la science ouverte (Open Science Barometer), Sudoc, Theses.fr, Patstat (patents), HAL, etc.

The new version includes new features and changes involving:

• the interface and user experience with a renewed design, a completely revised user experience (multi-object exploration, “thematic” enhancement of scanR’s content through focus and a bilingual interface (FR/EN);
• the enriched range of APIs;
• data with the integration of author identifiers (Idref), the identification of foreign institutions and new sources (research publications, theses, books and monographs, patents and projects).

These developments were the work of a team at the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’s Decision Support Tools Department supported by a community of expert users and various testers.

The application links together and thus covers over 37,000 organizations (public research laboratories, public institutions, companies, associations and foundations), nearly 500,000 authors, more than 87,000 cases of public funding and 2,000,000 publications, theses and patents.