As I am making my way into research, I stumble across tools that become a part of my daily work. Below, I will list what I use so that you don’t have to search as long as I did if your needs fit mine. I will focus an tools for reading & writing, as that’s common between disciplines. Read on for the list:
As I use a Mac, many of the following hints will be biased towards that platform. Anyway, maybe the hints are useful to show what could possibly be used. And maybe someone finds a Windows equivalent to some of the tools and is willing to share experiences in the comments.
- Tofu opens any text or even PDF file and displays it in columns. This makes reading papers onscreen actually feasible. If one could annotate the documents in that view, I would consider to stop printing papers.
- DevonThink is my content organization tool. I dump all downloaded papers into it as well as my own writings. It will then answer nice questions like “What papers are related to my current writing?” using simple but quite effective text mining techniques. Think of it as Spotlight on steroids. Spotlight is Apples Desktop Search that is similar to Google Desktop, but more useful. I’m sometimes asked what the alternative to that tool might be on Windows. To the best of my knowledge askSam is the only answer I can give. But to get all features of DevonThink, you will have to buy the Professional Edition as well as the Import Utility, which will set you back ~750$. I guess it will be able to do way more than DevonThink, which costs only 1/10 of that.
- BibDesk is a simple to use tool to manage your BibTeX file(s). It offers modern search as well as filters based on keywords, authors or any other BibTeX field. The two features I like most are: (1) You can paste a textual BibTeX entry from, say, ACM and it will create a new entry. (2) You can drag and drop LaTeX \cite commands from it to your editor of choice.
- TeXShop is a simple to use GUI for LaTeX. I use only the simplest features of it: LaTeX a document and update the PDF view on it. The nice thing is that the PDF will show the page you had open before the compile run. I have always tried to mimic that on Windows. So, if you have any idea how to do so, please comment.
So, what do you use for your research? Any tool or category of tools I am missing?