CORE vs Litmaps

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.

Litmaps is a web-based research tool that uses citation networks and advanced search to help researchers find papers and conduct literature reviews. Its search catalogue contains more than 270 million papers. A Litmap visualizes connections among articles through citations and references; users can annotate papers and change how the map is arranged. Topic monitoring sends automatic emails when new articles appear, and maps can be shared as images, public links, or with selected email addresses. The free plan costs nothing and includes basic search, up to 20 inputs and 100 articles, one Litmap, and a monthly summary, but no collaboration. Pro (Education) costs $10 a month, billed $120 / year - save 20%; it adds advanced search, unlimited inputs, articles, and Litmaps, plus daily or configurable alerts, and requires an academic email address. Litmaps Pro syncs Zotero collections with Litmaps Tags in both directions. Articles can also be imported from BibTeX, RIS, or PubMed files and exported in BibTeX, RIS, or CSV formats. Open Access PDFs are available to all users; other PDF access requires institutional access through LibKey.