Academic Search Ultimate vs CORE

Academic Search Ultimate is a multidisciplinary full-text database for scholarly research, with material spanning nearly all academic disciplines. It lists 10,199 active full-text journals and magazines, including 9,581 peer-reviewed journals; 5,873 active full-text journals are indexed in Web of Science or Scopus. The collection also includes 7,153 active global open access journals, plus periodicals, reports, books, conference proceedings and videos. Its video collection contains more than 6,700 videos from The Washington Post and other providers, and relevant titles may include ahead-of-print content. Through EBSCOhost, researchers can use basic and advanced search, citation assistance, saved searches and results, and subject browsing with access points in more than 30 languages. The EBSCO Mobile app supports searching, saving and sharing on iOS and Android. Institutional access is available; the product is also accessible on the web. It has no free plan, but a trial can be requested. Pricing is by request, with no subscription price shown.

CORE is a multidisciplinary discovery service for scholarly work gathered from repositories, preprint servers and journals. Its search covers research papers, journal articles, preprints, theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, reports and books. CORE says its collection holds 449 million searchable papers, including 57 million full texts. Researchers and the public can search this material; developers can use the API for real-time access to metadata and full texts. The CORE Dataset supports downloading data for analysis and text mining on an organisation’s own infrastructure, though access is limited to users representing organisations registered in non-sanctioned countries. Individuals can use the API instead. CORE Discovery is available as a browser extension, repository plugin and API, and CORE Recommender suggests related articles in repositories, journal systems and web interfaces. Free API access costs nothing, subject to rate limits of one batch request or five single requests per 10 seconds. Starting membership costs nothing for data providers. The service describes itself as not-for-profit and community-governed.