Tools for Academia

When you're studying or researching, there a quite a couple of tools which come in very handy in various situations. In the last 5 years at university I got to know quite a few, so I want to share my list with you.

Discovery

Sometimes, I just like to stumble around some papers. I'm not actively searching anything, but just looking for something interesting. In my field of research, gitxiv.com is really interesting for that. But also the recent papers at arXiv and trendingarxiv.

I know that a couple of people recently liked arxitics.com and control.kylemcdonald.net/arxiv, but I'm not using that too much.

See also: How to find new Papers

When I'm actively searching for papers where you know keywords, scholar.google.com is the search engine of my choice. academic.microsoft.com could be an interesting alternative.

Summaries and Explanations

A site which I discovered in the beginning of 2016 is shortscience.org. It gives you the possibility to save and share your summaries of papers. Have a look at my profile if you're interested. The service is still in its early stages, but I like it very much.

Scholarpedia.org is a site where you can finde some high-quality explanations. If I remember right, Hinton wrote some articles on Scholarpedia.

Of course, Wikipedia is always an option to get introduced to basics.

Writing

I do the actual writing with Sublime Text.

Typesetting

The typesetting system of my choice is LaTeX. It produces beautiful results, especially for mathematical formulae. A couple of years ago I wrote some installation instructions. If you need help with something specific, tex.stackexchange.com is really nice.

If you're only looking for a symbol to write with LaTeX, I can recommend write-math.com. Other options are available, too.

Content

If I have questions about academic writing (the content), then academia.stackexchange.com is the site of my choice.

Spell- and Stylechecking

I use aspell for spellchecking and Academic-Writing-Check to get some ideas where I might improve my writing style.

Reference Management

I like JabRef as it is in the standard repositories of Ubuntu and works out of the box to manage my references. I use it to fill my BibTeX files and add as much content to papers as I can. JabRef also has some nice options to find / open the paper for yourself.

Publishing

arxiv.org is one of the best places to publish your paper quickly. Even faster, but a lot less reach has zenodo.org. The nice thing about Zenodo is that you can share datasets, too.

Zenodo also gives all your uploads a DOI and offers visitors various ways to cite it. For example, for my HWRT database the BibTeX entry is

@misc{thoma_2015_50022,
  author       = {Thoma, Martin},
  title        = {HWRT database of handwritten symbols},
  month        = jan,
  year         = 2015,
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.50022},
  url          = {https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.50022}
}

Building a Profile

I'm not sure how important this is in Science, but there are some social networks for researchers.

ORCiD is one site which aims to give researchers unique numbers so that you can track who wrote what, even if people are in the same field of research and have the same names. It also allows you to add a CV as you can see with my ORCiD.

Google Scholar offers a simple version of that, too. See my profile or the profile of Hinton.

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