ResearchRabbit

ResearchRabbit is a free AI-powered literature discovery tool designed for academic researchers, graduate students, and anyone conducting systematic literature reviews. It positions itself as "Spotify for papers" — an interactive visual environment for discovering, organizing, and tracking academic literature based on citation networks rather than traditional keyword search. Researchers add seed papers to a collection, and ResearchRabbit visualizes the citation graph: papers cited by the seeds, papers that cite the seeds, similar papers based on content embedding, and the authors who connect them. The interface emphasizes graph navigation over list-based search results, surfacing relevant work that keyword queries on Google Scholar or PubMed often miss. Custom alerts notify researchers when new papers cite their tracked work, when collaborators add to shared collections, or when authors publish in tracked areas. The tool is fully free for academic use with no paid tier — funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other research grants rather than commercial pricing. This positions ResearchRabbit alongside Connected Papers, Litmaps, and Inciteful in the citation network category, but with a stronger emphasis on visual collection management and ongoing tracking rather than one-off paper discovery. ResearchRabbit integrates with Zotero for bibliography management and exports to standard reference managers (BibTeX, RIS). It connects to academic databases including PubMed, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and Crossref to build comprehensive citation graphs spanning multiple disciplines. Used by researchers at major universities including Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and Cambridge.