Tools to make your Academic Research breeze-easy

Siddharth Gupta
3 min readOct 19, 2021

Research can be a hassle unless you know the right software to aid you! Here’s a list of tools to make your Academia life super easy.

Note-making / Joplinapp:

In the online-Covid ridden class atmosphere, a note-making app came as a lifesaver. After researching and testing on 3–4 apps, Joplin is what I settled with. Joplin allows easy embedding images, videos, links, math expressions. It allows for beautiful page/notebook management, with a one-click pdf download option. The basic service is free, you may use the cloud support at less than 1 euro per month cost if you have student access.

Cite-editor / Zotero:

Scouring across 10s of research papers and keeping a track of citations for your academic writing can be excruciating. Zotero comes as a super-saviour. The tool allows for easy search of relevant papers just with the DOI link. It has the capability of linking with Microsoft Word or Google Docs (through extension), which makes the process a breeze.

Pdf-Reader / Okular (by KDE Community):

While for Windows/Mac Adobe PDF Reader is the go-to solution. I had to Google a bit for Linux variants. While there is a cut-and-chop way to use Adobe in Linux, I settled for Okular. It has two features that I was absolutely looking for: Multi-tab support and easy-to-use annotation tools.

Grammar Checker / Grammarly:

Grammarly extension has made my error-prone rate quite low, while I continue to question their plagiarism checker, they are the best in business when it comes to grammar-check. Especially if you have a premium subscription.

Exploring Research Papers / Connected Papers:

The fastest way to get important details of any paper, like Google Scholar link, PDF link, DOI and presents a cool visualization of related papers. To add further, it doesn’t even require a login.

Honourable Mention: ResearchRabbit (better at creating long term collections)

Subscribe to my mailing list, for more such weekly academic tips :)

I also run a YouTube channel on Higher Education in India: College Companion

More to Read: My first Hackathon experience!

--

--