# ResearchRabbit: Paper Discovery Tool and Data Sources

> ResearchRabbit finds academic papers from Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex data. It does not crawl websites. What publishers can do.

ResearchRabbit is a tool that helps researchers find academic papers through collections, recommendations and citation maps. It does not crawl the open web. Its database comes from three scholarly data providers: Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. A paper appears in ResearchRabbit when those providers have its metadata.

## What ResearchRabbit does

The [welcome guide for the new ResearchRabbit](https://learn.researchrabbit.ai/en/articles/12440130-welcome-to-the-new-researchrabbit) lists these functions:

- Save papers in collections.
- Find similar work, earlier work and later work for any paper.
- Show maps of research networks and author networks.

The current version rolled out on October 20, 2025. A free tier stays available next to an optional premium tier ([ResearchRabbit release 2025](https://www.researchrabbit.ai/announcement-researchrabbit-release-2025)).

## Where the data comes from

The help article [The ResearchRabbit database](https://learn.researchrabbit.ai/en/articles/12454605-the-researchrabbit-database) (June 2026) gives these facts:

- The database has more than 310 million research articles.
- The data comes from Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex.
- ResearchRabbit updates the database every week.

The same article gives reasons why a paper can be missing. The paper has no open metadata, the three providers do not index it, or it is too new to have full data. Users can still save a paper with little metadata and add the details for their own records.

For related tools, see the [Semantic Scholar guide](/ai-search-engine/semantic-scholar/) and the [Connected Papers guide](/ai-search-engine/connected-papers/).

## Ownership

In May 2025, Litmaps, a research tool from New Zealand, announced that it acquired ResearchRabbit ([IT Brief](https://itbrief.co.nz/story/litmaps-acquires-researchrabbit-raises-1-million-for-ai)). ResearchRabbit calls the arrangement a partnership. Its premium search features use Litmaps technology.

## For publishers and site owners

ResearchRabbit does not publish a crawler or a user agent, so robots.txt on your website has no documented effect on it. If one of your papers is missing, do these steps:

1. Make sure that the paper has a DOI with complete metadata in Crossref.
2. Make sure that Semantic Scholar or OpenAlex lists the paper.
3. Wait for the weekly ResearchRabbit update.

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