My Top 3 Favorite Research Tools

A sneak peak on what I use to find & evaluate the best patents

Teach a man how to fish, right? I think I’m long overdue to share with you few of my favorite tools that I use to do my research on a patent & the researchers behind it. This is a crucial step in making sure you’re prepared for the initial conversations with any researcher that you’re looking to partner with but more importantly, also well versed on who to reach out to in the first place!

Before I jump in, I actually want to point something out that’s worth sharing. Part of the reason I decided to start Action Potential is because I think one of the previous major challenges to IP licensing was discoverability. Patents are often written by lawyers and for lawyers so the language can be overly complicated (and for no good reason if you ask me). I’m a big fan of Paul Graham (founder of YC) and his writings, one of my favorite pieces is: Write Simply where he really highlights the true power of writing in an approachable way. I believe that now, thanks to LLMs and AI, we stand a chance at dramatically reducing this barrier to discovering great patents and I’m hopeful that this might mean that more of these patents will be licensed and actually result in a net impact on society versus sitting there and collecting dust.

And now back to the original programming, here’s a list (in no particular order) of some of my favorite tools to do research on the researchers:

1/ Elicit

If you haven’t heard of Elicit, drop everything and go create an account. This AI-first tool is truly mind blowing in terms of capabilities and potential, and the most impressive aspect of it is how quickly it’s evolving. The founders are intent on building the Google Scholar killer and they’re moving fast to make that happen.

In a nutshell, Elicit is a tool that lets you pose a question in simple human language and it will go and parse all related research papers that attempt to answer this question, it will then extract all relevant data from each and draft an executive summary based on the top papers in the field.

Screenshot of a recent question I posed to Elicit about Blood Pressure Monitoring

They’ve also recently added a feature that lets you chat with multiple research papers at the same time and ask questions that you can later save in a Notebook. It’s a really great tool to document your thinking and discovery around a topic.

2/ Research Rabbit

If Elicit is about answering research questions, Research Rabbit is about learning about the researchers behind the research. It’s a very visual tool that lets you easily see who are the top researchers in a field and who works with who (researchers have cliques). You can quickly see the most popular in a field, the authors (and co-authors) and who else they work with. It visualizes the clusters of researchers in a field which is super helpful in knowing who to talk and who competes with who.

They also have an alert tool though admittedly, I haven’t used it much recently because I’m often jumping between research topics.

3/ Lens.org

This tool is all about very quick discovery of the patents in a particular field, it’s extremely powerful and detailed but I still find it easy to use which is a plus. You can quickly tell based on keywords which universities own a lot of IP in that space and the researchers behind the research. Lens is also great for discovering which fortune 500 companies are also heavily investing in a particular research field, that’s useful info for competitive and fundraising reasons when you go out and try to approach the market to raise capital to fund the venture.

I hope you enjoyed a quick glance into some of the tools I use on the regular, let me know if you’d like me to do a deep dive into any of those tools in the comments below.

🎨 About the artist

Andrei Sokolov, a Russian artist renowned for his pioneering contributions to space art and lunar landscapes.