Digital Tools for Academic Research

Research

Research

Merriam-Webster defines 'research' as "careful or diligent search; studious inquiry or examination; the collecting of information about a particular subject".

So, it's not easy to conduct academic research.

elink

elink

Research often involves going through hundreds of links and articles and compiling it in one safe space for future reference or publishing them for your audience. This is why many researchers use bookmarking and curation tools like elink to quickly save their links under one roof and share it with their peers. elink makes it easy for researchers to save content from around the web. They can save article links, videos, cloud files, social media posts, and much more!

Researchers have the option of saving content to their link library or add them directly to content collections and share their research with their peers. To make the bookmarking process a breeze, elink also has a chrome extension. Simply click on the extension or right-click on any webpage to save the content directly to your elink dashboard. Researchers can edit the title and description to add their own voice or notes. They can even bundle links together and share their link collection with others as a newsletter or embed the collection on your blog/website!

bit.ai

bit.ai

Online research means going through numerous websites, articles, blogs, images, videos, infographics, and more to find what you are looking for. For our dynamic, interactive, and media-rich research, we need a tool that incorporates all facets of modern-day research under one roof. Simple text-editors of the past just won’t cut it anymore! This is where Bit comes in.

Bit allows researchers and teams to collaborate, share, track, and manage all knowledge and research in one place. It’s the perfect research tool to share multi-dimensional research with your peers and not just plain, boring text and slides. Add articles, PDFs, videos, white papers, ebooks, audio samples- basically anything you can think of – and share it with your peers easily!

Grammarly

Grammarly

Research work often involves hours of proofreading and spellchecking to make your research professional. Grammarly, a writing enhancement tool will save you a ton of time and effort doing this dreaded task! Apart from basic spellchecking and corrections, Grammarly includes a grammar checker, a punctuation checker, a vocabulary enhancer, and even a plagiarism checker tool!

This awesome tool scans your research for more than 250 types of grammar mistakes in six distinct writing genres and leaves you with error-free writing. With thorough explanations for all your errors and weekly progress reports., Grammarly is a must-have tool for researchers. It’s available as a browser extension, a desktop app, a web-based app, and a Microsoft add-in.

typeset.io

Typeset.io claims to be the smarter alternative to Word and Latex that all researchers should be using. Start off your research with an easy to use interface or import your existing Word files. With over 100,000+ verified journal formats to choose from, Typeform makes the process of research a bit too easy! Quickly copy-paste or upload your paper on Typeset and follow any citation style you need.

Typeset also has plagiarism and grammar checker built in to ensure your writing is error-free. Once done uploading and citing, click on autoformat to generate your report in seconds. You can also download your research in PDF, Docx, LaTeX file, or even as a Zip file. With collaboration features built-in, you can invite your fellow researchers to the platform and work together.

Scrivener

Scrivener is another great tool for research writing and keeping your notes organized. Used by researchers, screenwriters, novelists, non-fiction writers, students, journalists, academics, lawyers, translators, and more, Scrivener is a tool made for long writing projects. On signing up, you are quickly presented with its editor, with a sidebar to keep everything in place. You can also break your content into manageable sections of any size and leave Scrivener to join them together.

For novelists and storytellers, there’s also a corkboard to visualize your storyline and move cards around as you like. The outliner keeps a synopsis of what you have already written, along with word count data and metadata. Users can arrange their research articles and other files in folders and subfolders.

Google Scholar

Next up is an amazing research tool by Google called Google Scholar. Google Scholar provides a quick way to broadly search for scholarly literature from one location. Look for articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, from professional societies, online repositories, universities, academic publishers, and other web sites.

Researchers can also explore related works, citations, authors, and publications easily. Create a public author profile and see who’s citing your recent publication. Google Scholar also allows its users to keep up with recent developments in any area of research.

EndNote

EndNote

EndNote wants you to research smarter by simplifying the tiresome work of formatting bibliographies, finding full text, and searching for references. EndNote is collaborative in nature as it allows you to share selected groups of references, manage team access, and track activity and changes from one single dashboard. With smarter insights, EndNote automatically finds the impact of your references and finds the best-fit journal for your papers.

The platform also enables users to automatically create, format, and update bibliographies. Quickly export your references and full-text PDFs into EndNote and start working instantly. With a bunch of EndNote templates and plug-ins, researchers can get the most of the platform.

Mendeley

Mendeley

Mendeley is a reference management software that allows researchers to create references, citations, and bibliographies in multiple journal styles with just a few clicks. Quickly access your library from anywhere – from anywhere. Windows, Mac, Linux, etc and add papers directly from your browser with a few clicks or import any documents from your desktop to your library.

With its research network, researchers and connect and network with over 6 million users. Users can create groups to carry out discussions, discover research, and follow curated bibliographies.

ResearchGate

The last tool on our list for researchers is a platform called ResearchGate. ResearchGate gives you access to over 135 million publication pages, allowing you to stay up to date with what’s happening in your field. With a built-in community, researchers can share their research, collaborate with peers, and discover new papers and bibliographies.

ResearchGate also provides deep analytics on who’s been reading your work and keeps track of your citations. With over 17 million users, ResearchGate is a research community to join!