Best Digital Tools for Academic Research- Every Researcher Needs to Know
Lets get started.
Here is a list of various types of academic research tools.
Reference Management and Online Summarizing Tools:
#1 ZoteroBib
Zotero is free and easy-to-use robust reference management tool that allows you to collect, arrange, cite and share research.
ZoteroBib can fetch bibliographic data automatically from magazine articles, library catalogs, journal manuscripts, sites such as Amazon and Google Books, etc.
It provides free services that allow you to quickly create a bibliography in any citation style. Besides, you can integrate the source using its URL, ISBN, DOI, PMID, and arXiv ID, etc.
How to insert citations into a word document using Zotero
#2 Scholarcy
The Scholarcy is an artificial intelligence-based manuscripts summarization extension that collects text from journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters, research manuscripts, and displays an auto-summary of the text.
In addition to the above, it also extracts figures, tables, and bibliographies data, open-access PDFs for each reference from Google Scholar, arXiv, etc.
After extracting the summary from the article, it generates an interactive summary flashcard.
Besides, you can also export all references in this paper with the Scholarcy. Once you export the references, you can import it into the reference management software.
How to summarize a academic research article.
#3 Semantic Scholar TLDR (Beta Version)
TLDR creates single-sentence article summaries on the search result page. If you want to detect the right research papers then you can use this feature.
Now, the TLDR is available in beta version for nearly 10 million papers ( computer science field in Semantic Scholar).
If you want to learn more about TLDRs, go through the paper from the Semantic Scholar team.
#4 Paper Digest
If you want to read more papers in less time then you can use AI-powered Paper Digest. It lets you communicate your research swiftly.
In addition to that, this tool summarizes your research paper more effective way. You can upload your PDF file to obtain the summarize results.
Now, this application is in beta version and handles more than 2 million scholarly open access article. The web app summarizes scholarly articles for the researchers.
This tool allows researchers to quickly grab the key ideas of a scholarly literature.
Best Data Visualization Tools for Academic Research:
It is free and easy to handle software that lets you visualize and publish your data. Using this tool, you can create interactive graphs, stunning maps, and live dashboards in minutes.
You can save your data visualization in Tableau Public profile, and share it anywhere on the web.
The latest version of this software 2020.2 is available for Microsoft Windows and macOS only. The Tableau public edition is free but it is commercial for using desktop edition, server edition, web-based edition, and even mobile application.
# Google Data Studio
It is a free easy to use interactive dashboard that lets you create the line chart, bar chart, area chart, and pie chart. You can also generate reports as many as you can.
In this visualization tool, one report can use multiple sources of data and on the other hand, the same data source can be connected to many reports.
You can use it online using this link. You do not need to install any software. Here blog post, you can see Google Data Studio elaborately (step-by-step guide).
# SandDance
SandDance is an open-source easy to use data visualization tool developed by Visualization and Interactive Data Analysis (VIDA), Microsoft.
This software has been rewritten from scratch to be modular and embeddable into any custom applications. Using this tool, you can explore, and communicate insights about your datasets.
Many users can work with the same dataset. You can use it online using this link. You may visit this post for more details.
# Infogram
This software is easy to handle, flexible that lets you communicate with the technical members online to make their work easier and faster.
Besides, this tool also caters to real-time data processing and supports multi-terminal display.
It is worth mentioning that the uploaded data in this tool’s online database is public unless the user upgrades to a paid member in order to make sure its privacy protection. You can use it through this link.
# Google Charts
The Google Charts is a free tool, that lets you create and manage data presentations in a new way. If you have any queries about this tool you can get support from Google’s Forums and GitHub.
Google Charts does some great things with pie charts and pictographs, as well as animation. For more information- Click Here
Literature Review, Mapping and Discovery Tools for Academic Researchers :
Citation Gecko allows you to find papers to and from seed papers, but you can’t actually export the papers to your reference managers.
The Citation Gecko plays a vital role in the literature discovery process. This web app is developed by Barney Walker, Imperial College London to help relevant literature discovery to the researchers.
This state-of-the-art tool has been released as open-source on Github. The web app allows you to build upon each other’s scholarly work. The Citation Gecko open citation data to suggest relevant scholarly articles based on seed papers.
In order to fetch and visualize the relevant recommended research papers, you just upload “seed papers” in this tool. Once you enter the seed papers, it will take a few seconds to visualize the relevant scholarly papers.
As soon as you add the seed papers then this online tool automatically imports all of their references in the citation graph from OpenCitations.
The web app visualizes the relevant academic research articles in the following modes:
It would be better if you extract RIS/BibTeX from the uploaded PDF file that can be imported into a reference manager.
How to identify relevant academic research papers using Literature Discovery Tool (Citation Gecko).
#2 Open Knowledge Maps
The Open Knowledge Maps is a free and easy-to-understand web application. The state-of-the-art software is developed as open-source and released under an MIT license.
Open Knowledge Maps is a charitable non-profit organization that was founded by Peter Kraker.
It is one of the world’s largest visual search engine for scientific computing. Knowledge maps provide an instant overview of a topic by showing the main areas at a glance, and papers related to each area.
The web app allows you to find and explore the most relevant scholarly literatures through the trusted data providers BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search), Pubmed and OpenAIRE
You do not need to install any software for searching the most relevant scholarly resources. You can use this online web application through your desktop web browser.
If you are looking for a state-of-the-art robust visualization tool to find the most relevant papers in smart and efficient way, this tool is better for you.
The Open Knowledge Maps interface searches more than 7,000 content sources in all disciplines, providing access to over 140 million scholarly materials.
For details, you may visit this blog post on how to find the most relevant research papers using visual interface.
#3 Local Citation Network
The Local Citation Network allows you to identify the seminal papers by building and visualizing citation networks. Using citation network analysis, this tool does this work.
This web app was developed by Tim Wölfle, physician-scientist, Imperial College London.
Local Citation Network is an online free, open-source, and easy to use citation network graph visualizer and available on Github.
This visualizer tool lets you identify the connectivity between all of the literature.
Local Citation Network a free visualization tool to support the Literature survey.
#4 Connected Papers
The Connected Papers tool is a free an easy to understand smart tool. This citations mapping tool lets you search the relevant and credible resources.
After a long beta version, the founders have released the Connected Papers software to the public.
It has a user friendly graphical user interface. You do not need to install any software . You can use it through your desktop web browser. But, mobile browsers are not supported yet.
Like Cocites and Local Citation Network, this literature mapping tool accepts one paper for generating the graph. Local Citation Network uses references against your feeding paper rather than the citations.
But, Cocites looks at the citation to do the same work. Connected papers uses both of these two concepts to do the same job.
How to find and explore academic research papers using visual tool.
#5 CoCites
CoCites is developed by Dr. A. Cecile J.W. Janssens, research professor at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, USA.
Finding relevant papers on a specific topic is not an easy task from a plethora of papers. CoCites tool lets you search the scientific article on a specific topic quickly.
The tool allows you to find similar academic research papers during systematic reviews or meta-analysis. It discovers scientific research papers on the same particular topic based on input papers rather than keywords.
The data source of this software is the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), public access, broad coverage resources.
Cocites is now available for Safari web Browser. In order to download the browser extension visit this site. You can also go to the app store for same purpose.
Read the in-depth guide how to find relevant academic papers with cocitations.
The Inciteful is a easy-to-use literature finding tool. The web app was officially launched in beta version on 19th December 2020. The Inciteful allows you to find relevant academic research papers fast.
It can assist in discovering research articles related to the particular topics you have. It is developed using open metadata and citations.
Below are the data sources of the Inciteful:
Inciteful creates a network of scholarly literature based on a topic and then analyzes the network to help you search the most relevant articles.
You can export a Bibtex file of relevant papers from Zotero or Mendely and then upload the file using the “ Import Bibtex file” link below the search bar on the home page.
Just make sure that the file has DOIs, URLs etc matched.
If you want to know more details about the Inciteful then Click Here.
Theses are the best digital tools for managing scientific articles for academic research.
Academic Search Engines (Multidisciplinary):
#1: Google Scholar
The Google Scholar lets you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. It has the biggest index of scholarly materials in the world.
Google Scholar is one of the largest and most advanced academic search engines. It was launched in 2004. It is a free multidisciplinary, easy to use, robust search engine. The search engine lets you find relevant work across the world of scholarly literature.
You can search across various disciplines and sources like abstracts, articles, theses, books, patents, conference proceedings, online repositories, and other web materials.
It indexes 390 million scholarly literature across a range of disciplines. You can access both open and closed source scholarly materials using this discovery tool.
You can search across various disciplines and sources like abstracts, articles, theses, books, and online repositories, universities, and other web resources using a single window.
#2: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is a free open-source multidisciplinary academic search engine. The BASE allows you to search scholarly resources on the web.
In order to find journal abstracts, articles, preprints, images, and videos, BASE search engine plays a pivotal role.
The BASE search engine was designed and developed by Bielefeld University, Germany. At the time of this writing, this tool provides more than 241,960,866 documents from more than 8,348 sources.
The academic search engine indexes the metadata of various types of academically relevant materials such as journals, institutional repositories, digital collections, etc.
#3: COnnecting REpositories (CORE) Academic Search Engine
The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) is one of the largest aggregators of open access research papers. The CORE a multidisciplinary not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University and JISC.
CORE is designed and developed with more filters and facets. It provides open accessed scholarly literature. Besides, this aggregator harvests and caches full-text scholarly articles from various registries.
From various registries, such as OpenDOAR and DOAJ, it uses the information to include new repositories and journals into CORE.
The search engine supports all kinds of modern browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and operating systems.
#4: Semantic Scholar Academic Search Engine
The Semantic Scholar is a free, multidisciplinary Artificial Intelligence based academic search engine that permits you to explore and discover relevant scholarly materials on the web.
The discovery tool was launched in 2015 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
In order to search the high quality, peer-reviewed academic research papers, you navigate to Semantic Scholar. The state-of-the-art AI-backed tool supports modern web browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge
Using the Artificial Intelligence baked engine, this robust tool extracts the meaning from the scientific literature. This multidisciplinary tool indexes high-quality research articles from all fields of science.
It supports BibTeX, MLA, APA, and Chicago format and the latest versions of the most popular operating systems.
#5: Microsoft Academic Search Engine
The Microsoft Academic Search Engine lets you search journal titles, conference names, and many research topics from various sources on the web. You can search for any topic, journal, conference using the search engine.
This web search engine has been designed and developed over the open dataset provider Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). You can process the dataset of scholarly metadata offline through the MAG subscriptions.
In a previous post, I already discussed and demonstrated elaborately the above academic search engines.
Research Datasets Search Tools for Academic Research:
# Google Dataset Search Engine
This search engine provides the search results based on their license whether it is free or paid, formats like CSV, pdf, txt, JSON, images, and their provenance. This engine does not curate or cater to direct access to the datasets directly.
A lot of the data in the index comes from the Government and Research Institutions, almost 2 million datasets from the US government alone but that still leaves 23 million other datasets on a huge variety of various subjects.
# Dimensions
The Dimensions provides datasets from more than 800 repositories such as Figshare, Dryad, Zenodo, Pangaea and many more.
In order to search across various content types, such as publications, grants, patents, datasets and policy documents you can use this web app.
Besides, it also caters an array of search and discovery, research management apps, entire things in a single framework.
You can add your ORCiD account with Dimensions to submit publications from Dimensions to your ORCiD record.
# DataCite
DataCite is a non-profit organisation that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research data and other research outputs.
Datacite Citation Display: Unlocking Data Citations – Click Here
Academic Writing Tools for Academic Research :
#1 LaTex
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting document preparation system that includes features designed for the preparation of technical and scientific documentation.
LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. You can download this tool through this link.
#2 LibreOffice
This suite is a free and open-source robust software. It is one of the fastest-growing projects in the free and open-source software world. You can download this tool through this link.
#3 MiKTex
MiKTeX is a free distribution of the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system for Microsoft Windows. You can download this tool through this link
#4 Google Docs
It is a free online document for personal use. You can create, edit and collaborate your document using your gmail account.
Online Survey Tools for Academic Research :
Google Form
You can create your own form of any type (Feedback, Survey, etc,) using your Gmail account. Google form supports unlimited surveys and respondents.
Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is easy to use and flexible and powerful tool. It is one of the most popular tools for creation the interactive and dynamic form. You can sign up for using the free version of this tool.
Typeform
You can sign up for using the free version of this tool. It is easy to use and flexible.
Lime Survey ( Erstwhile PHP Surveyor)
Lime Survey is a free and open-source online statistical survey web application. It is written in PHP, and available on Github.
Data Cleaning Tools for Academic Research:
# OpenRefine (Erstwhile Google Refine)
We know that Python, R, and Julia are the most important languages for data cleaning. But, you have to have some programming knowledge for the data cleaning job.
It is a difficult job for non-technical users. OpenRefine is the best choice to alleviate the same. No programming skills are required.
It is the most well known open-source powerful data cleaning tool used by researchers, librarians, etc.
On one hand, OpenRefine is good at clustering values to clean up dirty free text fields. On the other hand, it caters to reconciliation services that let you clean up data by matching against various sources.In addition to that, you can also transform from one format into another. OpenRefine allows you to explore large data sets with ease.It works on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, and available in more than 15 languages. OpenRefine keeps your own dataset private on your machine until you would like to share or collaborate.
# Trifacta Wrangler
This is a data wrangling tool that aids you in cleaning and preparing messy data more quickly and accurately. You can use freeware versions of this commercial data cleaning tool.
It accelerates data cleaning and preparing with a state-of-the-art platform for cloud data lakes.
Statistical Software:
#1 JASP
JASP is free, flexible, robust and open-source software supported by the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. The state-of-the-art tool generates statistics easily and swiftly for you in APA-formatted tables that are embeddable into a document.
The interface of this package is intuitive and similar to SPSS. The software works on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux. You can download the software (All Releases) from their site.
#2 Jamovi
The Jamovi is free, easy to use third-generation, open statistical software. The tool is an alternative to commercial software such as SPSS and SAS.
The software is made by the scientific community and for the scientific fraternity. This software works equally on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS. You can download the software (All releases) from their website
Academic Discovery Services for Researchers:
# Fatcat
Intert Archive’s Fatcat is publicly-editable catalog of research publications such as journal articles, conference proceedings, pre-prints, and so forth.
The goal is to improve the state of preservation and access to these works by providing a manifest of full-text content versions and locations.
They use full-text URL lists from the following sources :
Unpaywall (How to Find Free Open Access Full-Text Journal Articles using Unpaywall)
At present, this search engine is available in beta version. For details please visit the site.
Backup and Recovery Tool :
Bacula is an open-source network backup software. Using this software, you can manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.
Social Media for Academia Researchers :
# ORCID
We use ORCID to get a persistent digital identifier(ORCID ID), and that distinguishes us from every other researcher. ORCID connects their ID with professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review etc. For details visit this site.
# Academia
The Academia is the easiest way to share papers with millions of people across the world for free. As of writing this article more than 147,328,911 academics and researchers join in this community.
In order to sign up in this social media you can use your google or Facebook credentials.
# Figshare
The Figshare is an online open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open data.
You can upload, manage share files of any format upto 5GB in Figshare.
Plagiarism Prevention/Checker/Detection Software :
# Urkund
Urkund is an easy to use, robust and reliable plagiarism checker that allows you to check uploaded scholarly works for text similarities against their millions of sources. this tool can be added into your learning management system.
# iThenticate
iThenticate is the most trusted plagiarism checker by the world’s top researchers, publishers, and scholars. Easy to use reports make it easy to narrow in on the most critical matches and protect your reputation.I think the above mentioned most powerful e-research tools help the academic researchers to make their research more effective and organize.
Hopefully, this post was useful to you! What other digital tools have you used for the academic research ?