OA and the research lifecycle 1: identifying a new research area | Research Support Hub

" ... Whether you already have an idea for a new research area or are uncertain where to start, gaining an overview of the current literature is critical.  Fortunately, not all of this is hidden behind paywalls.  Thanks to those researchers who have been willing to disseminate their work through open access repositories and journals, there is now a substantial quantity of research available freely to all.  Much of this is harvested by CORE (COnnecting REpositories).  CORE’s mission is to 'aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public' (About CORE).  CORE currently indexes nearly 25 million open access articles.  Because it communicates directly with repositories using a standard technology (the OAI-PMH protocol) CORE is able to access content that may be invisible to web crawlers such as Google Scholar. The use of a standard protocol also means it is able to populate its database with known fields and therefore offer an advanced search capability and refinement of results.  Try out CORE here ..."