Alternatives to CORE

A search engine and database aggregating hundreds of millions of open access research papers. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.

  • CORE

    A search engine and database aggregating hundreds of millions of open access research papers.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

Replacements

Listings that take over the same core job as CORE.

  • Google Scholar

    Google's free search engine for scholarly articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

    Google Scholar covers all disciplines including paywalled work and case law, and adds alerts and author profiles, but it needs a Google account for those features.

  • Semantic Scholar

    A free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature covering papers from all fields of science.

    FreeProprietaryWebBrowser extension

    Semantic Scholar indexes more than 238 million papers beyond open access, offers a public API and a browser extension, and adds the beta Semantic Reader.

  • The Lens

    A search and analysis platform for patents and scholarly literature, with charts and collections.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

    The Lens searches patents alongside scholarly literature, with built-in charts and shareable collections, and some features require a subscription.

  • Open Knowledge Maps

    A nonprofit visual search engine that builds topic maps of research literature.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

    Open Knowledge Maps is a nonprofit visual search engine that builds topic maps from metadata, covering datasets and software, not full text.

Similar software

Related functionality, not a direct replacement.

  • Inciteful

    A free web tool that uses citation graphs to find related academic papers and connect two papers.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

  • ResearchRabbit

    A web tool for literature reviews that finds related papers and builds citation maps.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

  • Litmaps

    A literature review tool that maps citation networks around seed papers to find related research.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

  • Elicit

    An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

  • Consensus

    An AI search engine for peer-reviewed literature that gives evidence-based answers drawn from papers.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

  • Paperlib

    An open-source desktop app for organizing academic papers, scraping their metadata and exporting references.

    FreeOpen sourceWindowsmacOSLinux