ResearchRabbit (product review)

Abstract

ResearchRabbit is a scholarly publication discovery tool supported by artificial intelligence (AI).It was developed in 2021 by a team of three in Seattle [1].This tool lets users discover publications related to one or more seed publications with the help of visualization maps and lists of earlier, later, and similar publications.ResearchRabbit is designed to support the workflow of unstructured searching while providing a left-to-right trail from the original publication(s) through any selected authors or publications.These trails, which can run as deep as rabbit holes, suggest the origin of the tool's name.To start using ResearchRabbit, users first need to create an account.Then they need to create a collection and add at least one publication.The more publications that are added, the better ResearchRabbit can understand users' interests and generate recommendations similar to the contents of the collection.Publications can be added either by uploading a RIS or BibTeX file or by using ResearchRabbit's search, powered by PubMed, if users are searching the medical sciences, or Semantic Scholar, for any other subject area.While ResearchRabbit uses PubMed's and Semantic Scholar's search engines, the company claims its unique database of "100s of millions of academic articles" is second in size only to Google Scholar [2].Once publications are in a collection, ResearchRabbit's algorithm will begin generating recommendations.These recommendations can be explored through two modes: 1) by Papers that are Similar work, Earlier work, or Later work or 2) by People that provide additional publications that These authors or Suggested authors have published (Figure 1).These recommendations are depicted using visualization maps.Fig. 1 Different exploration modes