By Justin Harrison, Engagement & Learning Librarian and PhD Candidate, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria
On March 11, 2026, as part of the BCcampus EdTech Sandbox series, I introduced participants to the generative artificial intelligence tools Research Rabbit and Consensus. In particular, we looked at how these tools can bolster academic literature searching for post-secondary students and researchers. Workshop participants explored how AI can support literature reviews in practical ways, while also examining the ethical issues related to GenAI tools, such as plagiarism, privacy, and research integrity. Participants gained a foundational understanding of key AI-powered literature searching tools and learned how to evaluate their outputs for accuracy, relevance, and bias through hands-on activities.
The session was bookended with a mix of introductory and contextual slides about the artificial intelligence landscape, and ethical considerations for academic researchers. In the middle section of the workshop, I presented an overview of each of the tools, placing them within a larger context of other GenAI tools, followed by substantial, experiential, hands-on time for learners to work through directed activities designed to enable the familiarity, utility, and use cases of both tools.
Outline of the Tools and Their Main Features
Both tools were presented as providing support to expand the literature searching process, within the context of the challenges of both finding enough key sources on our research topics, as well as identifying the most relevant sources among a sea of results.
Research Rabbit works semantically to search the metadata of existing literature, providing visual connections between related papers based on citation connections. When searching by topic, researchers can ‘seed’ a map with one or more references to find connections to other articles.
Research Rabbit is citation-based, linking source metadata, including abstracts and references, to other sources that cite or are cited by the others. Given that this tool is not searching the full text of sources, no summary or chat feature common to some other tools is available.
Consensus also surfaces papers for literature searches, and provides a key takeaway for each paper, which is essentially a generated summary. Also, Consensus has a chatbot feature enabling the user to query one or more papers more deeply for additional commonalities, differences, themes, etc.
Strengths of the Tools for Researching
The corpuses of both tools consist solely of existing scholarly articles and outputs so researchers can be safe in the knowledge that all references surfaced in these tools are authentic. While both tools are free to use, both also have a paid tier to access additional features and/or number of searches. These tools are safe and reliable ones to introduce to students for use, along with library databases, in their literature review needs.
Research Rabbit’s main feature is its intuitive visual mapping of citation relationships. As such, the researcher can easily see clusters of authors or papers citing one another, providing leads for further references, as well as identifying sources by currency and/or higher citation counts. Additionally, Research Rabbit can find similar articles to ones you’ve identified by using its semantic search to infer related topics and sources.
Consensus searches semantically as well as across the full-text of articles, using your search terms to retrieve references. The platform provides a textual overview of results, identifying the key themes within the results and linking to the related sources of information. In the free tier, Consensus generates summaries (called snapshots in the platform) for up to 10 articles a month, which provide additional attributes of the top article results, such methods, population, and results.
Weaknesses and/or Considerations Before Implementing the Tool
While both tools rely on Semantic Scholar (which has agreements with many academic publishers) as part of their corpuses, users should understand that both rely heavily on open access content. While it is encouraging that open sources are, as such, likely finding a larger audience in these tools, users should be mindful that a typical B.C. university library provides access to a far greater number of sources, including ones behind subscription paywalls that are not available to these platforms. Consensus does, however, provide for institutional linking to facilitate access to your library’s available online subscriptions from within their (more limited) set of results. Hence, these tools are best thought of as supplements to our library database searching rather than replacements.
Research Rabbit defaults to mapping only 20 sources at a time (in the free tier), requiring the user to move forward to the following page of results to get a map of the next 20 sources. This feature prevents the user from enjoying the overall map of related sources at a glance, and somewhat undercuts the main feature of the platform. Consensus does suggest more features available in their paid Pro tier, but being made aware of these features may cause some frustration for the researcher. As such, users may find the free tiers somewhat limiting as they potentially prevent us from accessing the full potential of the tools.
Recommended Activities
Directed activities for learning about these two tools, as well as two additional tools Elicit and Undermind, are available on the workshop LibGuide.
Reflections on the Webinar
Overall, workshop attendees definitely preferred the much broader tool of Consensus to the more focused Research Rabbit. Learners valued the additional contextual information Consensus provided about the overall search topic, as well as the individual attributes available in the study snapshots of articles. The learners had many great questions and comments, and I would like to thank them for their engaged and supportive participation.
Webinar Resources and Transcript
If you missed the webinar, or want a quick refresher, you can access the webinar recordings and transcript here:
EdTech Sandbox Series: Literature Searching with Artificial Intelligence