AI TOOLS

How I Navigate Research Rabbit-Holes With ResearchRabbit

It’s quick, nimble and free

Dr. Fox, The AI Academic, about to gleefully and unwittingly enter down a research rabbit hole. If only he had this AI tool. Image credit: Author, generated in leonardo.ai

Tumbling Down The Rabbit Hole

Searching for research papers usually looks like this:

1. You start searching for papers on Google Scholar.
2. You get a bit lost.
3. You open up a million tabs.
4. You get a bit more lost.
5. You save those tabs because you ran out of time to go through them.
6. You never open them again.
7. You completely lose track of how you got to any of them.
8. Then you have to start the whole process again because it just seems easier.

This is like tumbling down a rabbit hole without a map or a guide.

That’s where Research Rabbit can help 🐰

Like any good rabbit, it’s fast and nimble and it allows you to easily jump back and forth between research paths.

So let’s jump in…

Research Rabbit

The Key Value: Keep track of your progress along the research path.

Like Litmaps, you need a paper or two (or 20) to start with, and what you’re doing is building up a collection.

Screenshot of the “New Collection” button on researchrabbit.com. Image credit: Author

You can upload papers or you can find some with Research Rabbit’s search function.

Screenshot of the “Add paper…” search bar on researchrabbit.com. Image credit: Author

(Don’t worry, it’s also possible to add a paper you don’t know or don’t love.)

As you build up a collection, the rabbit will start suggesting papers based on what’s in your collection.

Screenshot of the search and research paper selection columns on researchrabbit.com. Image credit: Author

By clicking on the Similar Work, or the Reference or Citations buttons, a new panel will open to the right and you’ll get a map of those papers and how they’re connected.

See Like a Rabbit

The visualisation feature here isn’t as smooth as those in Litmaps or even Connected Papers.

Screenshot of a research network graph on researchrabbit.com. Image credit: Author

But it gets a few extra points for not just showing the citation network or relevance network, but also the network of cross-citing authors and their other works, and for suggesting authors as well as papers.

Like a good guide, the rabbit really wants to get to know you better. So it will change its suggestions based on papers you add to the collection.

And then as you add more papers to your collection from those new suggestions, the suggestions again will change.

So, even though it doesn’t give you the same direct measure of research exhaustiveness that Litmaps does, the rabbit holes of suggested papers will naturally taper off at some point and you’ll get the sense that you’ve gone sufficiently far.

Perhaps the most valuable characteristic of Research Rabbit is that it stops you getting lost as you wander down the seemingly endless rabbit holes of research.

Each step you took to get where you currently are is kept to the left of the screen. So if you do find yourself 50 wrong turns down a path, at least you’ll be able to find your way back to reality.

You can also share your collections with collaborators, so you can save time for your entire team instead of just sending them a list of references without the context of how they’re connected.

Screenshot of the collaboration invite input section on researchrabbit.com. Image credit: Author

The Catch

There kind of isn’t a catch, at least not a financial one — the rabbit is free.

Though, it is a bit chaotic — strangely appropriate to the rabbit metaphor — or at least the user interface seems that way at first glance.

But that chaos is actually a sign of the fact that it has so many features.

So the time you might have to spend figuring out how to use the rabbit definitely pays off in the long run.

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