ResearchRabbit

ResearchRabbit is a citation-based literature discovery tool for academic researchers, graduate students and review teams. Users add seed papers by keyword, DOI or title, and ResearchRabbit surfaces related work through citations, references, co-citations and co-authorship, shown as interactive citation maps. Its help center states that it does not use large language models to power its core recommendation algorithms. The database covers more than 310 million articles drawn from Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex and is updated weekly. Keyword search runs on the Google Scholar search engine and has supported AND, OR and NOT operators since April 2026. ResearchRabbit is owned by Litmap Limited, the company behind Litmaps, which acquired it in May 2025, and it relaunched on a rebuilt platform in October 2025.

ResearchRabbit connects to Zotero through a Zotero Importer that brings Zotero collections in, and articles go back to Zotero as a BibTeX export. The vendor says two-way Zotero sync is in development. Mendeley, EndNote and Paperpile libraries can be imported as BibTeX files, and reference lists export as BibTeX, RIS or CSV. The Institution plan adds LibKey for full-text access through a research library. The vendor's blog describes alerts on collections when related papers are published. No public API or MCP server is published. The interface is in English, and the help center recommends browser translation for other languages, noting that search coverage is richest in English. ResearchRabbit is a web application, and the vendor documents no desktop app.

ResearchRabbit publishes three plans. Free costs $0 with no time limit and includes unlimited searches, unlimited collections, shared collections with editors, viewers or a public link, the Zotero Importer, BibTeX import and export, and up to 50 seed articles in a search. RR+ costs $10 per month billed annually ($120 per year) or $12.50 billed monthly, in US dollars. It adds up to 300 seed articles, advanced search filters (keyword, publication date, journal quartile and h-index, open access and retractions), multiple projects, Signals article-risk badges and faster support. Country discount codes cover more than 100 countries. The Institution plan is priced on request and adds volume discounts, LibKey, user management and usage statistics.

For formal screening and data extraction in a systematic review, Rayyan (from $4.99/mo billed annually) is built for that workflow. Elicit (from $49/mo billed annually) adds AI-written summaries and data extraction across papers. For sources beyond the scholarly literature, Perplexity AI ($17/mo billed annually) and ChatGPT Deep Research ($20/mo) search the web and news. Litmaps, from the same company, is a separate citation-mapping tool with its own alerts and two-way Zotero sync.

Current state Q4 2026: The July 9, 2026 release added a Reading List, a choice of 10, 20 or 40 articles on each map, and Signals risk badges for RR+ users. Signals flags papers whose citation behavior or citation network suggests higher risk. A February 2026 release restored shared collections on the free plan and added a Recently Found folder, nested subcollections and saving of low-metadata articles. ResearchRabbit states that it is trusted by more than 1,000,000 researchers worldwide. Its data responsibility page says it does not train AI models on users' articles or notes. Its privacy notice, last updated November 7, 2025, addresses the GDPR and the CCPA, its subprocessor list names Amazon Web Services for hosting, and it publishes no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification.