Research Rabbit

ResearchRabbit is a free AI-powered academic paper discovery tool used by thousands of US graduate students, PhD candidates, and academic researchers to find and map related research literature. Often described as "Spotify for research papers," it learns from the papers you add to your collections and surfaces personalized recommendations you would never find with a standard keyword search. Instead of searching one paper at a time, ResearchRabbit lets you add multiple seed papers to a collection — then generates an interactive visual map showing how those papers relate to each other, which authors are most influential in the field, and which newer papers have cited them. This makes it especially powerful for systematic literature reviews and dissertation research, which are common workflows in US universities. ResearchRabbit pulls data from Semantic Scholar, Crossref, and OpenAlex, giving it broad coverage across STEM, social sciences, and humanities fields.

For US researchers already using Zotero — the most popular reference manager at US universities — ResearchRabbit's Zotero importer is a significant time-saver. You can import your entire existing Zotero library directly into ResearchRabbit and immediately start visualizing how your saved papers connect and discovering what you may have missed. In 2026, ResearchRabbit added sub-subcollections for deeper organizational structure, a "Recently Found" section that lets you save papers immediately and organize them later, and improved sharing tools that let you share a read-only collection link with your dissertation advisor or research team without requiring them to create an account. The platform remains completely free — funded by non-profit grants — with no paywalled features and no paid tier.