CORE API Guide

Overview

CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is the world's largest aggregator of open access research papers, providing access to over 130 million articles harvested from thousands of data providers worldwide. The CORE API enables programmatic search, retrieval, and analysis of scholarly full-text content across repositories, journals, and preprint servers.

The API is particularly valuable for researchers conducting systematic reviews, bibliometric analyses, and literature mining tasks. Unlike many scholarly APIs that only provide metadata, CORE specializes in delivering full-text content, making it essential for text mining and natural language processing workflows in academic research.

CORE's v3 API provides a RESTful interface with JSON responses, supporting complex search queries with Boolean operators, field-specific filtering, and batch operations. It is free for non-commercial academic use, though an API key is required to access the service.

Authentication

CORE requires a free API key for all requests. Register at https://core.ac.uk/services/api to obtain one.

Always store your API key in an environment variable and reference it in requests:

export CORE_API_KEY=$CORE_API_KEY