When conducting research, the right instruments and methodologies must be used and this cannot be stressed enough. You need a research tool if you’re a non-native English speaker to improve your written English and a strong statistical research tool for your work if your research incorporates data analysis. Some other researchers would need a research tools like Google Scholar and Research Gate to work with their peers, since it’s crucial to keep track of what other researchers in your field are doing. To avoid academic dishonesty, you also need a reliable plagiarism detection program. To keep track of deadlines, you also require research project management software.
In this article, we go through a few helpful research tools that might help researchers work more efficiently.
Overleaf
Overleaf is a collaborative cloud-based LaTeX editor used to create, modify, and publish scientific documents.
It collaborates with many different scientific publishers to offer direct submission links and official journal LaTeX templates.
Overleaf has been considered in Nature, Science, Red Hat’s opensource.com, and the German IT journal Heise Online, as a tool for authoring scientific publications.
The European particle physics research facility CERN, located close to Geneva, Switzerland, officially chose Overleaf as its preferred platform for collaborative authorship in 2017.
Research Gate
Researchers can share articles, ask and answer questions, and look for collaborators on the commercial social networking site ResearchGate. It is the largest academic social network in terms of active members. Some poll by Nature magazine and Times Higher Education reveals that almost as many academics have Google Scholar profiles.
While there is no need to register to view articles, users who want to become members must either have an email address from a recognized university or have their status as a published researcher manually verified before they can create an account. Users of the site can post research output such as articles, data, chapters, negative results, patents, research proposals, methodologies, presentations, and software source code to their own user profiles. Users have the option to converse with other users and follow their activity. Additionally, users have the option to stop interacting with other users.
Google Scholar
A freely available web search engine called Google Scholar indexes the entire text or metadata of academic publications from a variety of publishing formats and fields. The Google Scholar index, which went live in beta in November 2004, includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court decisions and patents. It also includes abstracts of theses and dissertations.
Google Scholar uses a web crawler to find documents that can be included in search results. Google Scholar only indexes content that satisfies a set of requirements.
Plagiarism checker
Content owners and creators (students, professors, bloggers, and researchers) use Check-Plagiarism.com to identify instances of “content theft,” which occurs when content is copied from one website on an online available resource to another without the author’s or owner’s consent. Many content providers also uses this online tool to identify instances of content fraud. Also, in cases where recycled content is offered for sale as brand-new original content.
Reverso
The Reverso tool focuses on AI-based language tools, translation software, and language services. These include contextual dictionaries, multilingual online concordances, grammar and spell checking software, and conjugation tools. The tool also includes Online translation based on NMT (Neural Machine Translation).
Final word
In this article, we went through 5 of the most used online tools available for academics and researchers. From translation, plagiarism checkers, content editing and content listing, these tools can be a life saver for some researchers struggling with content creation presenting their findings. Also, the cloud aspect of these tools make it much easier and secure for day to day work.