Research Rabbit (+Zotero) for Literature Mapping
Part 1 of finding research gaps with FREE tools
Hi Scholars,
Today’s newsletter is Part 1 of the two-part series on finding Research Gaps using completely FREE tools 🤩
To start with some updates:
We are now a community of over 6000 readers 🎉 Congratulations for choosing to stay ahead of the curve by learning to use AI in research!
On another note, I just hit 1000+ followers on Twitter (whew it’s tough!). If you’re active on Twitter, make sure to give it a follow.
To celebrate this, I’m giving a 30% off discount code to my 7-hour Masterclass: HAPPY30
This is not something I’ll offer again, so if you’re still thinking, here’s an opportunity to avail it now. Read unfiltered testimonials here with one highlighted below:
Btw, Professor Nacke’s Write Insight newsletter offers practical academic success strategies, effective writing frameworks, and insights on AI research tools for scholars. Join 3500+ academics to enhance your research skills and stay informed about developments in academic writing and tech.
Lastly, I’m also planning a webinar on how to use Claude 3.5 for your research.
Nowww, moving on to today’s topic ⬇️
Manual Literature Mapping is tedious, boring, and time-consuming. It is used as a starting point to connect you to other relevant literature and involves many steps:
Step 1: Find a highly relevant article on your topic using Google, Google Scholar or PubMed.
Step 2: Search the article by copy/pasting your article's title/DOI/ PMID or keywords into the search box.
Step 3: You will get a long list of articles and you may explore papers by
Looking at the references to go back in time. (Backward Citation)
Looking at who has cited the article to go forward in time. (Forward Citation)
Look at the author to see what else they have published.
Looking at “Keyword Suggestions”
Looking at related articles recommended by the database
This activity will take your whole day and at the end of the day, you are only able to find a few articles.
But, now with the advancement of AI technology, preliminary search can be done within minutes.
Let me introduce you to one of the popular literature mapping tools called Research Rabbit. It is a “Forever Free” tool for Researchers.
You can use Research Rabbit to plan your literature review outline for many reasons!
Why? Because it's a citation-based online mapping tool that helps you find papers based on one or a set of seed papers (Provided paper) or a research topic by keywords.
It will create citation maps as well as networks of recommended articles based on user-provided collections of articles. You can further explore by
Finding "Similar Work"
Finding "Earlier Work" - all references
Finding "Later Work" - all citations (citing articles)
Explore "These authors" - refine your search to specific authors' works
Explore "Suggested authors" - expand your search to related authors' works
You can get article and collaborator recommendations, set alerts, and share collections.
The same work done in manual mapping can now easily be done by Research Rabbit with just ONE CLICK.
Research Rabbit is always free for researchers, however, to use this, you need to create an account on it.
Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Research Rabbit with Zotero Integration.
STEP 1
Export Paper from Zotero
1- Open a collection of papers in your Zotero citation manager. From that collection, select a handful of papers (I recommend you select 5-10 papers to start)
2- You can do this by holding CTRL while clicking on a paper selection. Then, right-click the highlighted papers and select the option for Export.
3- You'll be prompted to save a file. Select BibTex for Mendeley or Zotero. Select RIS for EndNote. Name the file whatever you like!
***Bonus Tip***
I encourage you to add only a few papers at a time in this manner as
1) more targeted papers will enable ResearchRabbit to find more targeted recommendations and
2) Too many papers will slow down Research Rabbit for you and will not be able to give you targeted results. (Figure 1)
STEP 2:
If you haven’t already created an account on ResearchRabbit, do so here:
https://www.researchrabbit.ai/
And then let's start to understand Research Rabbit Interface:
Import Papers into Research Rabbit
1- Drag and drop the saved file into your project within ResearchRabbit.
2- If Research Rabbit can find DOIs for your papers, they will automatically be added to ResearchRabbit!
Uploading Papers into Research Rabbit
1- Upload the Zotero BibTex File into Research Rabbit (Figure 2).
Generating Map
1- Create a collection for your paper by naming them.
2- Select the paper of your choice and add comments. These comments serve as an initial note of your paper.
3- Click on connection. It will generate the visual map based on your paper (Figure 3).
Map Interpretation
You can explore the map by understanding different functions in interferences. For example, you can
1- Find similar work based on your paper.
2- Explore forward citations.
3- Explore later work or backward citation.
4- Explore all author networks.
5- Visualize map based on
i) Network- connected paper
ii) Timeline: Paper published year wise.
6- Visualize a map based on the Author or last Author.
7- Map representation
8- Download the Map for later use.
9- Add New papers to your collection.
10- Explore the Suggested author with similar work suggestions.
11- Export your reference.
12- Collaborate with your Research Partner or make it publically available to everyone. (Figure 4)
STEP 3
Manage your Reference with Research Rabbit
1- Click “Export” on the left-hand taskbar to download any list of papers into BibTeX (.bib) or RIS (.ris) format.
2- Take your BibTeX or RIS file and drag and drop it into your citation manager. Once your papers are in there, select all of the papers, right-click and update the details.
i) In Mendeley, it’s called “Update Details”
ii) In Zotero, it’s called “Find Available PDFs”
iii) In EndNote, it’s called “Find Reference Update” (Figure 5)
Navigating Research Rabbit for the first time can be a bit frustrating.
The above tutorial helps you use Research Rabbit to the fullest.
In my next newsletter, I will introduce the strategies on how you can identify research gaps in your collections.
In case you’ve missed, I had explained how to find research gaps using Litmaps in my previous newsletter. If you find Litmaps useful, you can use my code to get a 30% off on both monthly and annual plans: RAZIA30.
PS. I’m receiving some good feedback on my FREE proofreading GPT tool:
Here’s how to use it:
Paste your text into the input field. If your document is lengthy, consider dividing it into smaller sections to expedite the process.
Please be patient as it may take a while to prepare the files. You can monitor the progress by clicking 'analyzing'.
If the GPT behaves unexpectedly, take a short pause and try again
Learned something new in this newsletter?
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.. & stay tuned for the Part 2 on finding research gaps using Research Rabbit next week.
Nice work 📝❤️