ResearchRabbit is designed to work with traditional library resources, not replace them. Together, they help you discover more relevant research, understand how ideas connect, and build a stronger, more complete literature review.
There are many ways to get started with ResearchRabbit, including by using our keyword search, looking up a research question, pasting a DOI, or by connecting to your Zotero collections. This guide explains how ResearchRabbit helps you explore more of the literature landscape, and how to combine them effectively with conventional library searches.
Why use ResearchRabbit alongside library databases?
University library databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, JSTOR, or subject-specific archives are the bread and butter of research tools. Your university library search is usually the first place you'll go for:
Structured keyword searching
Discipline-specific indexing
Accessing full-text articles
Accessing university repositories
Requesting interlibrary loans
ResearchRabbit complements these strengths by focusing on discovery and connections, helping you:
Undertake systematic and reproducible searches
Discover related work you would not think to keyword search
Explore citation and author networks visually
Iterate on your search as your understanding evolves
Identify influential, emerging, or interdisciplinary research
How ResearchRabbit helps you cover more ground
Traditional searches rely heavily on the keywords you already know. This can be limiting when:
Terminology varies across disciplines
New concepts use unfamiliar language
You need interdisciplinary insights
You are early in your research and still defining the field
With ResearchRabbit’s network-based search:
You can start from multiple relevant papers, rather than relying on a single seed paper
Searches expand through citation relationships and closely connected work in the literature
This means that discovery is driven by how papers relate to one another, not just shared words
By analyzing citation networks, ResearchRabbit moves the search beyond keywords and helps you identify relevant research you might otherwise overlook.
Iterative searching that actually complements your real research practice
Library searches are often static. You define a query, get results, then start again if your focus changes. This is great when you’re just starting out, but ResearchRabbit helps you dig deeper and build on your original search step by step.
ResearchRabbit supports iterative searching:
Start with a few relevant papers
Review recommendations
Assess connections and relevance
Save strong papers as new inputs
Expand again to find even more relevant work
Many of these practices such as citation chaining and iterative refinement are well established in library research, and ResearchRabbit provides a visual, network-based way to support them.
Each iteration refines your search rather than resetting it. This reflects how researchers actually work in practice. This makes it easier to move from a broad topic to a focused research question while continuously building out your literature map.
Broader coverage through an expanded database
ResearchRabbit has access to over 280 million academic records, searching across:
Using this advanced database, ResearchRabbit:
Reduces blind spots caused by relying on a single database
Surfaces newer and interdisciplinary research more effectively
Complements institutional databases with open scholarly metadata
Library databases provide full-text access, while ResearchRabbit helps you spot connections and decide what belongs in your paper. You can see some of the publishers included in the ResearchRabbit database here.
Visual sense-making across large bodies of literature
Finding papers is only part of the challenge. Understanding how they fit together is often harder. ResearchRabbit’s updated visualizations help you:
See how papers cite one another
Identify clusters, subfields, and gaps
Compare seminal work with recent publications
Track how ideas evolve over time
This makes it easier to explain your literature review logically, especially in PhD chapters, proposals, and presentations.
Using ResearchRabbit alongside your University Library Search
There are lots of ways to search within ResearchRabbit. Here is a practical workflow to combine library searches and ResearchRabbit in your literature review.
1. Start with a paper from your library databases
Use your university library resources to:
Run structured keyword searches
Identify foundational and highly relevant papers
Meet disciplinary or systematic review requirements
2. Use key papers as seeds in ResearchRabbit
This shifts your focus from keywords to exploring actual relationships between papers. Take the strongest papers from your library search and:
Search for them in ResearchRabbit
Select 1 to 3 as starting papers
Begin a network-based exploration
⚡️ Recommendations are calculated based on the articles that are the most influential in the citation network, where influence comes from both the number and quality of citations. Find out more about how search works.
3. Expand your search iteratively
This helps uncover adjacent, overlooked, or interdisciplinary work. You can review your recommended papers and:
Save those that are clearly relevant
Re-run the search with these new papers added
Search for Similar Work
Explore adjacent topics and approaches
Use Advanced Search to customize filters and further target your search.
4. Access full texts through the library
ResearchRabbit focuses on deeper discovery and exploration. Libraries provide access to your papers. At this stage, you can:
Follow the article links from ResearchRabbit to the publisher’s page
If ResearchRabbit hasn’t found an open-access link, use your institutional access to download PDFs
Check alternative versions such as accepted manuscripts or open access copies
Request items via interlibrary loan if needed
5. Organize, note, and prepare to write
After you've searched for your papers, the next step is to:
Organize papers into collections
Take notes within ResearchRabbit directly alongside articles
Export citations to your reference manager or writing software
Notes and collections will help you on your journey to a comprehensive and conceptually structured lit review. When you’re ready, export to a reference manager for writing.
