CORE is a multidisciplinary search service for open-access scholarly work collected from repositories, preprint servers, and journals. It covers research papers, journal articles, preprints, theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, and books. CORE says its collection contains 449 million searchable research papers, including 57 million full texts. Researchers and the public can search for literature, while developers can retrieve metadata and full texts through a real-time API. Free API access without registration is limited to one batch request or five single requests per 10 seconds; registered users receive better performance, and higher rates require a quote. CORE Dataset provides downloadable data for prototyping, analysis, and text mining, but access is limited to users representing organisations in non-sanctioned countries; individuals may use the API. Discovery tools are available as a browser extension, repository plugin, and API. A recommender plugin can suggest similar articles in repositories, journal systems, and web interfaces. CORE describes itself as a not-for-profit, community-governed service. Commercial API use is permitted subject to its terms, and some uses require a licence.
Who it is for
CORE can serve researchers and members of the public looking for open-access scholarship, as well as developers and institutions integrating discovery tools. Organisations seeking dataset downloads should check the stated eligibility limit.
What is good
- Searches across multidisciplinary scholarly literature.
- Provides API access to metadata and full texts.
- Discovery tools include a browser extension and repository plugin.
- Free API access is available without registration.
What to know first
- Unregistered API requests are rate-limited.
- Dataset access is limited to eligible organisations.
- Some commercial API uses require a licence.
Verdict
CORE offers broad scholarly discovery alongside API, dataset, and integration options. Its free unregistered API has a request limit, and dataset downloads are not available to every individual user.
CORE plans and pricing
All plansCompared on academic research databases
- Free plan
- Yes
- Full-text access
- Yes
- Advanced search
- Yes
- Subject coverage
- multidisciplinary
- Content types
- research papers, journal articles, preprints, theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, books
- Theses and dissertations
- Yes
- Conference proceedings
- Yes
- Institutional access
- Yes
