CORE vs Elicit

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.

Elicit is an AI research assistant for researchers gathering and assessing evidence. Its Research Agent draws on scientific databases, academic journals, public data sources, uploaded documents, a corpus of 138 million academic papers, and the wider web. A session can use up to 20 uploaded resources, including PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and JPG files. Elicit offers Research Agent sessions, Research Reports, and Systematic Reviews, and supports AI-generated claims with sentence-level citations to underlying sources. It can find up to 1,000 relevant papers and analyze up to 20,000 data points at once. Research Reports export as PDF or Word, tables as CSV or Excel, and references as RIS or BIB. Elicit runs on the web and provides an API, but API access requires Pro or above. Its MCP server connects to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and other compatible clients using OAuth 2.0. Basic is free with limited usage for Research Agent and Research Reports; Plus costs $11 a month. Pro is $39 a month and Scale is $89 a month. Elicit states that it has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance.