Research Toolbox

I will use this article as my weaponry for all the goodies I come across during my academic journey. It’s going to be a curated list of software, tutorials, advice and many other things that I find particularly useful and would like to share with everyone reading this.

I know this is not going to be anywhere near exhaustive, but I’ll try my best to keep it refreshed. So, please come back now and then, or give me some suggestions for additions.

Literature Review

Zotero

I read lots of papers. A bibliography management software is absolutely essential for me to keep things organized. Zotero has been my goto option. It’s open source, and has a whole array of features, one click web import, synchronization, pdf reader, very fast search, just to name a few. I’d highly recommend you to check it out if you feel the need of managing your references with a good tool.

One of my favorite things about Zotero is the plugin ecosystem around it, which makes it a breeze to integrate into many of my existing workflow. Below I’ll list a few plugins I deem essential to have.

ZotMoov

Zotero supports syncing your library across devices with their own cloud service, but there is a storage quota for pdf of the papers for free tier users. ZotMoov is a plugin that helps you offload the pdf storage from Zotero’s cloud service to other cloud storage or your NAS and alike. It’s fairly easy to setup and has been working great for me. UC Berkeley Library has a nice how-to guide.

Better BibTex

For people writing in LaTeX, Zotero’s BibTeX export comes in pretty handy. A problem with the default exporter though is that the citation keys are always auto-generated, the style is rather inadequate for large library. Better BibTeX grants way more control of the citation keys. The strong defaults it ships with makes it a great tool out of box without any configuration. Read their documentation for a more in-depth guide.

Google Scholar PDF Reader

Wonder what’s this seemingly relevant paper cited with [12] or with a useful last name [Liu et al. 2020]? You can always jump till the references section and look it up, but I find the process quite tedious, disrupting and distracting. Sure, there’re many PDF readers that allow you to peek into the reference list by hovering the citation without jumping. But Google Scholar PDF Reader lets you do the job with the lowest effort.

A simple click gives you most of the useful info like titles, abstract, citation count, and a link to the paper’s website right off the bat in a pop-up window. The best is works in Chrome so no need to download the pdf to make it work so no need to switch back and forth between the browser and other software. It is really convenient especially when I need to quickly browse through the related work section of a paper and identify relevant references.