Written by Mette Bechmann
ResearchRabbit is one of a handful of literature mapping tools that have emerged in recent years and offer alternative ways to identify connections between papers than more traditional tools such as Scopus and Web of Science.
How to use it
Set up collections of 3-4 (or more) seed papers, i.e. core or interesting papers in your field. ResearchRabbit will then chart connections within the body of literature that your papers belong to and in turn display similar, earlier, and later works and suggest authors.
How it works
ResearchRabbit uses bibliographic coupling, co-citation, and shared authorship to generate suggestions. The coupling strength of two documents increases with the number of citations to other documents they share, and co-citation occurs when two papers are cited together. The more co-citations, the stronger the connection between papers.
Sharing and collaborating
It is very easy to share and collaborate on collections of papers, whether with a single colleague or an entire research team. Simply add e-mails and set permissions for each collaborator.
Users of Zotero, a reference management software, can connect their accounts to ResearchRabbit and download references to seed papers from there. Stay clear of confirmation bias – maybe it would be just as useful for you to set up a collection of papers that disagree with your favorite papers and then explore the networks that unfold from them.
Want to know more?
ResearchRabbit uses MAG data (Microsoft Academic Graph). For a comparison of traditional and more recent academic search engines, see Martín-Martín et al., 2021
.