ResearchRabbit helps you discover research, streamline your search and manage your entire literature review with ease. Here's how it helps:

This guide will take you step-by-step through using ResearchRabbit for your literature review.

A literature review is a summary of the existing knowledge and research on a particular subject. By identifying gaps in the literature, it provides a foundation for future research. As such, it’s a crucial first step in any research project.

A literature review serves several purposes:

Looking at existing examples of literature reviews is beneficial to get a clear understanding of what they entail.

💡Hint: To find an example, try searching for your topic along with the term "literature review".

Here's how to take your literature review from start to finish using the ResearchRabbit app.

Before jumping in, you need to first identify your topic of interest. What is your research on? This may be the theme of your entire PhD, a class assignment or a suggested topic from your supervisor.

The key is to clearly formulate your research as a question or topic. Be as specific as possible. For example:

❌ “Why do birds migrate?”

✅ “How is avian migration influenced by light pollution in South America?”

Now that you've identified your topic, you can dive into the research behind it. If your topic is particularly nuanced, you may want to start the search with some key concepts behind the topic.

For example, don't simply search for entire research question. Instead, search for keywords and phrases (i.e. “light pollution” AND “bird migration”).

To get started with a new ResearchRabbit search, set up a free account if you haven't already. Then, click the search bar on the front page. Here you can search for the most relevant keywords on your topic. Then, hit Enter or click Search.

You've now ran your initial search in the ResearchRabbit database, and get back a list of relevant papers. This is usually where most search tools end. But, it's where ResearchRabbit just gets started!

From here, you want to identify one relevant article on your topic. Browse the list of suggestions, reviewing the title, date and citation count. You'll want to look for a paper with a:

✅ Relevant title

✅ Recent publication date

✅ High citation count

Of course, the specifics will depend on your project and priorities. In general, it's best to start with a highly cited paper, because this indicates a piece of research that is well-known and influential in the field.

Click on any papers you find relevant and review the abstract to ensure it's on your topic. You can even click the title itself to go directly to the source article to skim it in more detail.

Try to select 1 - 3 papers at this step. Once you've done so, you're ready to really dive into the literature. Click "Find more articles"!

You're now at the core of the ResearchRabbit search! You've selected a few articles to search on and are now exploring the most relevant literature on your topic.

You'll see your search on the visualization in the center of the screen. The dots with the seedling icon represent the article(s) you inputted (your seed articles), and the white dots are suggested papers. They are recommended because they share many connections (via citations and references) to your seed papers, and can thus be deeply relevant to your research.

The articles on the map are organized so it's easy to spot key papers. The x-axis is date of publication, and the y-axis is citation count. Look towards the top left of the graph for seminal papers and high-impact work, and towards the bottom right for recently released publications.

You can go through the suggested articles on the map or the list to find highly relevant and important papers on your research topic or question.

🗺️ On the visualization: See how articles are all connected by lines indicating how they cite one another. They're also arranged based on the date of publication (x-axis) and citation count (y-axis). This makes it easy to quickly find more recent work, or more high-impact work, but looking where the article is positioned.

📋 In the list: You can also scroll through all the papers in the list to examine them one-by-one. You'll find all the important details, like their title, date of publication, authors, journal and abstract. Use this information to determine if it's worth reading in more detail.

When you think you found a relevant paper, click on it's title to go to the source page. You can jump right into the PDF, or skim the article in more detail to evaluate how relevant it is for your work.

Once you've found an important paper on your topic, don't lose track of it! Just click the checkbox next to the paper in ResearchRabbit to save it.

You can also categorize it in a special collection. For example, you can keep track of sub-topics, authors, or types of papers in different collections. Each time you discover an article that fits into one of your categories, save it to that collection.

💡Hint: The key to a successful literature review is staying organized, and saving papers you find is the first step.

The best part of ResearchRabbit is that it takes you from the beginning of your research, all the way to the end! That's possible by doing iterative searching.
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Now that you have searched on some papers, found one or more relevant recommendations and saved them, you can repeat this process until you've found all the relevant papers for your review. Once you save a paper, ResearchRabbit lets you re-run your search with that paper also added as a search input. This updates your results and helps you find even more relevant papers.

So, when you're ready, click "Find more articles" to re-run the search and jump back to Step 4️⃣.

You can also keep exploring in a couple different ways too:

👉 You can jump back to Step 3️⃣ to explore new sub-topics or ideas that come up during your research.

👉 You can click "Refs" or "Cited By" for any article to explore that paper's citations or references uniquely.

💡Hint: The more papers you save, the more precise your search gets. That helps you to get the most targeted papers on your precise topic. This is what's unique to ResearchRabbit: iterative, targeted searching for the research that matters most. 🐇✨

You've done a few iterations in ResearchRabbit and have found perhaps dozens of relevant articles on your topic. Now, it's time to really start putting your literature review together.

Access the articles you've saved in your Library. Go through each one, reading it, taking notes, and carefully synthesizing your findings. Remember: the hallmark of a great literature review isn't just summarizing, but carefully constructing new ideas and findings based on what you read.

You can keep track of your notes and findings within ResearchRabbit, too. Click on an article and keep notes on it just under the title. Access the source link or PDF by clicking the title.

Finally, the last step in the literature review process is writing up all your findings. Whether you're doing a report, writing an introduction to a research paper, or completing an entire literature review chapter for your PhD, the writing portion of the literature review is the most important step. Here's where all that work comes together into a well-formulated narrative about your field.

And no narrative is complete without accurately sourcing all the articles you've used! You can export articles you found in ResearchRabbit as a BibTeX, CSV or RIS from your Library. Use these files in your writing software (Overleaf, Google Docs, MS Word, etc.) to easily cite and manage your sources.

You've taken your literature review from start to finish using ResearchRabbit. From searching for your initial topic, to finding just a few papers, to iteratively growing your entire research library, you've curated all the research you need for your literature review. If you followed the steps above, you'll also find it effortless to finally write up your final literature review by relying on your saved notes and organized sources in your ResearchRabbit library.

Of course, your exact literature review will depend on the context of your research and project. For example, a systematic literature review will often involve repeating this process on several source databases, and recording your search criteria. Be sure to consult your venue's or assignment's requirements to check these specifics.

Once you're done, be sure to take a moment to give yourself a pat on the back. Each literature review is a novel contribution. It's a unique look at the existing literature, reviewing the state of research at this snapshot in time. Without these reviews, researchers wouldn't have any context for future work. Congrats on your novel and essential contribution!