Some Unsolicited Research Tool Suggestions

2025-01-22

For many it's the start of a new academic term and with that many, many research projects are kicking off or going into high-gear. For some, it's settling back into a familiar groove; for others, particularly students, it can be their first experience of "doing research" - a previously nebulous term that they now get to put into practice.

While what "doing research" looks like will vary wildly from project to project, how we go about conducting research can certainly be made a lot easier based on the tools we choose. Here I've chosen a selection of unconventional, overlooked, or just interesting tools that I use on a daily basis to track, organise, and guide my research. Some of these are purpose-built for academic purposes, others have just been repurposed to fill a very effective niche.

For some, their undergraduate dissertation or other such project might be their only real exposure to academic practice before they depart for the world of work. For others, it can be the catalyst that persuades them to remain in academia; either pursuing another degree or employment. I've tried to make selections that cater to both camps - tools that, once learned, offer benefits outside of just a research context but that offer functionality that's beneficial regardless of your situation, both in the short term or over a career.

Tellico/Zotero

Unless you are trying to establish an entirely new field of science, you probably are not starting your research entirely from scratch - there's likely a body of existing work that you can pull and learn from. That's where bibliography managers come in. Bibliography managers do just that - give you an easy and convenient way to manage what you're reading, planning to read, or have already read.

Whenever these kinds of discussions come up, Zotero is almost certainly the number one choice - and for good reason. It's widely available, used by just about everyone, and offers more functionality than you'd ever need. If you just want to get up and going with a bibliography manager, Zotero will probably do you for an entire career.

However, if you want to dig a bit deeper, I'd like to also suggest Tellico. Tellico is also widely available and offers much of the same functionality as Zotero but I've found Tellico to be just a tad more reliable. Tellico also offers a wide range of export options as well if you're wanting to share bibliographies across different formats. Minor issues with Zotero not quite importing bibliographies between machines quite right have also never appeared when I've been using Tellico.

Regardless of what one you choose, having a bibliography manager is almost a necessity for any research project and so I've spoken about Tellico and bibliography managers in general before.

OneTab

Stumbling down rabbit holes are inevitable during research and so it's certainly common to have dozens if not hundreds of tabs open at once. Much to the chagrin of my machine, I previously just kept all of these tabs open until the project was done - OneTab helps resolve that.

OneTab is a small web extension that offers a button which, when clicked, automatically saves all your open tabs so you can reopen them later. You can export and import saved tabs between machines and even create shareable URLs if you want to send a collection of pages to someone else.

Despite such basic functionality, OneTab is now among the first extensions I install on any new machine. Whether it's keeping tabs (literally) of what I'm looking into, a throwaway idea that doesn't quite merit bookmarking, or just clearing up my open tabs so I can focus on what matters, OneTab has made itself indispensable.

Sort Tabs by URL

Andy McKay's 'Sort Tabs by URL extension' does exactly that.

While you're out searching for relevant papers and other materials, you'll probably end up with dozens of different papers open from the likes of Springer, IEEE, ACM etc. This extension can let you easily collate those tabs together, finding accidental duplicates, highlight areas you should be looking into in more depth (if you have a lot of tabs from the same source), and generally take the headache out of managing many, many tabs at once.

LaTeX

LaTeX is the lingua franca of academia, there really isn't a way around it. For those considering a future career in a University, that alone gives you reason to learn this incredibly powerful language. But even for those not set on such a course, LaTeX makes writing documents laden with references, images, equations, just about anything, a breeze.

Learning an entirely new language just to write documents might seem excessive but the reality is that working in LaTeX can be as easy or difficult as you want it to be. While there are thousands of additional packages to offer whatever functionality you need, the core language is intended to give you beautiful, legible, and robust output by default with minimal manual configuration.

Where I've found LaTeX to really be of use is in tracking changes to a document over time, because LaTeX files are just plain text files, it isn't difficult to add them to a version control system and give yourself a way to roll back any edit you have ever made.

Vim

If LaTeX has a noticeable learning curve then Vim is a cliff edge. Despite the considerable effort involved in learning Vim and its many, many keyboard commands - I think the effort is genuinely worth it.

If you're reading this blog, you're probably interested in, if not already, working in a computing-heavy job and so are very likely to be working with a lot of text, editing code, and doing general 'computing-things'. With that, Vim is a tool that you could learn and then keep using across your entire career. It runs on every platform, is incredibly reliable, an offers functionality out of the box to support just about any use case and situation you might need.

At the end of the day, it's Vim. If you want a text editor that will simply always be available and do whatever you need it to, Vim is the one.

Pdfgrep

When I first stumbled on Pdfgrep, it was one of those tools that I was stunned I hadn't already thought of myself. Pdfgrep lets you search the text of PDFs, that's it. It's functionality is so simple and yet the benefits of it are immense. When you're hundreds of papers deep trying to remember which one had some crucial data point that proved your thesis but you can't remember what the title was - pdfgrep is the tool for you.

I've used pdfgrep constantly for just about anything: to quickly pull papers with the same authors, same keywords, similar results. Pdfgrep really stands as one of the tools where its basic functionality belies its capability.

Zim

As a project grows and develops, it can become impractical having all your notes in one linear document. A more adaptive way then can be to setup a personal wiki. While tools like Notion, Obsidian, and Roam operate in much the same domain, I'll suggest Zim here as it's one I previously used and it was more than adequate. You can spin wikis out into websites if you need to collaborate with others, and the markdown-first structure helps make backups with the likes of Git easy.

Instead of endless disparate notes across pages, a wiki lets you easily compartmentalise topics by linking across relevant pages. This can be particularly useful when bridging across a range of different topics, instead of needing to constantly restructure your notes as new information emerges, you can just create a new note and link to it. It's this kind of approach that makes wikis particularly well suited to research where you probably don't know every sub-topic that makes up your research area. You can just create new note, attach a few links, and focus more on getting the content down rather than where it sits amongst everything that's come before.

Find Papers

A small bit of self promotion here but what was initially just an afternoon project is now something I use every day. 'Find Papers' lets you search dozens of academic sources right from one input box. Just pick the sources you're interested in, enter your query, and Find Papers does the rest.

Rather than trying to remember what sources you've looked at and what keywords you used, Find Papers smooths over that by letting you automatically search across all relevant categories and generally streamlines the research project.

You can read the introductory post about Find Papers here.