Utilities, software or otherwise, used for a better academic life
8
votes
2answers
390 views
How to physically handle hundreds and hundreds of papers
I have a bit of a meta-question about academics.
I am a graduate student and teaching assistant. I often find myself flipping, organizing, and searching through stacks of hundreds and hundreds of ...
23
votes
4answers
422 views
How to manage theorist's “labbook”?
Question:
Are there any guidelines, sources, or examples of good practices for maintaining theorist's research notebook?
Motivation and context:
Maintaining a lab notebook is a much advised (if not ...
8
votes
5answers
233 views
“Telecommuting” in academia
In business (e.g. IT industry) remote work (aka "telecommuting") can be relatively common (see e.g. a recent StackOverflow blog post). It is exceedingly rare (or even nonexistent) in academia, even ...
4
votes
2answers
124 views
Does using a bibliography software actually save you time aside from when converting citation style?
Does using a bibliography software actually save you time aside from when converting citation style?
I have used refworks and endnote for years and from 3 years ago I decided to ditch them both and ...
10
votes
3answers
168 views
Is there a network map of subjects and how they connect with each other?
The problem
When doing a literature review at the start of a process of addressing a specific problem, it's easy to miss related material, if I don't know that it is related.
The example
Let's say ...
14
votes
6answers
367 views
Are there any mobile application for conference attendees?
I'm currently attending a conference, and considering that (almost) everybody has a smartphone, but not necessarily an Internet access (because of roaming charges), it could be nice to have an ...
10
votes
2answers
155 views
Web Service to fetch article citations
I am trying to find a way to search for all the citations contained in an article. What I want to do is create a workflow for my research where:
I have a pool of articles that I have already read.
I ...
17
votes
10answers
2k views
OpenOffice Vs. LibreOffice Vs. MSOffice for academic writing
What office package is good for academic writing purpose? These three are the most popular for a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style rich text editor.
PS: Avoid LateX reference please. This ...
11
votes
1answer
2k views
API, EULA, and scraping for Google Scholar
I love Google Scholar as my go-to place to search for papers. Some features like "forward-citations" and their nice-ish autogenerated bibtex are life savers. However, sometimes I (and others) wish we ...
6
votes
1answer
233 views
What are some proven methods for keeping track of research and programming in a lab notebook format?
Are there any proven methods for keeping a computer science lab notebook? What sort of stuff goes into a CS lab notebook, and what notation is used? Are there any reliable ELN methods, preferably ...
9
votes
3answers
223 views
Getting DOI from title
Is there a way to get the DOI(Document Object Identifier) of a research paper when its title is available?
I am preparing a reference database I could not get the url of all the references. So, I ...
7
votes
4answers
175 views
What are useful tips and tricks for collaborating remotely?
What techniques have you found to improve collaboration with a remote colleague, in particular to make it feel more like collaboration in person?
The majority of my collaborations are with ...
20
votes
7answers
2k views
Software/App for electronic research notebooks
I want to keep a research notebook for my computational "experiments". Basically, I should at least be able to write text and attach images like plots. Other nice features to have would be
linking ...
19
votes
9answers
878 views
Tool to manage and/or make available a list of my publications on the web?
This some kind of follow up question to How to prevent plagiarism of my papers?, since I've been clearly convinced that it was in my best interest to put my own papers on my webpage.
Now, since I ...
4
votes
3answers
283 views
Is there a generally accepted format for submitting papers to journals?
I believe in Mathematics and Computer Science journals usually accept LaTeX documents. In fact, the AMS has a number of packages and document classes for just this purpose.
What about other ...
9
votes
2answers
309 views
Is it worth to switch from Bibsonomy to Mendeley?
What are the advantages of Mendeley over Bibsonomy?
Is it easy to migrate from Bibsonomy to Mendeley?
Does Mendeley offer equally powerful bibliography exportation?
In detail, the following ...
13
votes
5answers
1k views
How to make a presentation that includes math symbols?
For many years, I've used Latex to create my presentations, because I need to include mathematical formulae and symbols. However, it's sometimes quite cumbersome to use, and it's much harder to do ...
34
votes
7answers
2k views
Non-linear note-taking software
I'd be interested in tools helping to organize thoughts and ideas, especially in a non-linear way (i.e. not as most existing note taking tools, working with lists and bullets, but rather as a post-it ...
29
votes
3answers
271 views
Is there a good site for holding online discussions of scientific papers?
Many of my computational scientist colleagues used to use Google Reader to share and discuss new journal articles. The loss of Reader's social features killed that, and we have subsequently tried ...
