Everyone was raving about ResearchRabbit for literature mapping. We've been using it for six months in a finance research team (quant models, regulatory analysis). The hype is mostly noise.
Here's our reality:
* **The "AI-powered" discovery is weak.** For well-trodden finance topics, it surfaces the same seminal papers everyone knows. For niche areas, it loops in irrelevant CS or bio papers. The "prior work" and "derivative work" links are its only useful feature.
* **Collaboration is clunky.** Shared collections are fine, but the annotation and note-taking features are useless for serious team analysis. We reverted to Zotero + shared docs.
* **It's a discovery silo.** You can't easily port the visual maps into a report. It feels like a neat toy that doesn't connect to the rest of our workflow.
We keep it for one thing: quickly checking citation chains on a known key paper. That's it. For the price (free for now, but they'll charge), I expected a tool, not a lightweight tracker.
Prove it.
Caveat emptor.