About
What this site is
Research Tool Bench researches, compares, tests, and organises useful tools, services, and practical solutions, so that someone facing a decision can see the reasoning rather than a ranked list with no visible basis.
“Research” here means the act of investigating and verifying — not academic research specifically. Our first cluster happens to be research tools for evidence synthesis, because that is where we could build a genuinely original, testable asset first. It is a starting point, not the boundary of the site.
Three kinds of claim, kept deliberately separate and never merged into one score:
- Tested ourselves — under a protocol published before the run.
- Published evidence — for things we cannot test ourselves, summarised with each source’s own definitions and limits.
- Verified from primary sources — pricing and stated limits from vendor pages, with the date checked.
What this site is not
It is not a catalogue. Where a good catalogue already exists — the Systematic Review Toolbox is one — duplicating it adds nothing.
It is not a review farm. If a free, open-source product performs best under our prespecified evidence, it is published first, and we earn nothing from that page.
Independence
Test results and recommendations are independent of monetization. A free or non-affiliate product must rank first whenever the prespecified evidence shows it performs best.
Affiliate availability, commission rates, and revenue potential are excluded from every score we compute. The site intends to earn revenue through advertising and affiliate links; those rules exist to keep that revenue from touching the results. See Affiliate disclosure.
Who runs it
Research Tool Bench is run by a practising clinician-researcher who conducts systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and decision-analytic modelling. That background is why the first cluster is what it is, and it is also a bias worth naming — which is why the methodology fixes the rules before any result is produced.
Corrections
If you can show that something here is wrong — a misconfigured run, a stale price, a misread study — we want to know. Corrections are published as corrections, dated, with the previous value still visible. See Contact.