CORE vs Lit Mind Maps

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.

Lit Mind Maps is a web tool for Masters and PhD students conducting literature searches and evidence mapping. Users enter a research question in plain language or provide a paper title or DOI. The service returns cited answers based on retrieved academic papers, then places those papers in a three-branch literature mind map and idea timeline. Branch sets can be changed before another search. A citation map displays a seed paper, its references and citing papers as bubbles arranged by year and citation count. Five optional answer sets address definition, mechanism, evidence, effects and comparison, with three branches each. After signing in and searching, users can download a Word starting draft for a literature review or proposal. Records come from Semantic Scholar. Searches use titles, abstracts and metadata rather than every paper’s full text. The service describes results as a starting aid and advises checking papers.