Writing a research paper can be hard. It’s even harder when you’re not sure about the best way to structure your report. Some people like to outline their report, while others write it straight away and revise later. And that’s just the beginning!
How do you know what tools will work best for you? What’s the difference between a bibliography and a works cited page? How do you keep track of all your sources? We’ve got you covered in this post on the best apps for writing a research paper.
Let’s get started!
Best Apps For Research Papers
Gone are the days of going to the library, studying numerous books, taking notes on paper, and doing research. Thanks to technology, we no longer have to do this tedious routine to do research. However, research is still a meticulous, painstaking process.
This is why we decided to uncover some of the best software tools for researchers that are going to help you conduct and maintain your research with ease. Read on…
List of Top 13 Best Tools for Researchers for better results:
Research today is dynamic. We often use the internet to browse websites, watch videos, study analytics, and conduct our research by exploring different types of digital content, making technology a major stakeholder in making our research success.
While the internet has made it easy for us to access worldly information with the click of a button (or mouse!), it has created a whole new set of problems.
Sorting through a seemingly infinite number of websites, verifying content, and curating only the best stuff can take a lot of time and effort. This is why we have brought you 13 essential research tools every researcher should use while working on the internet.
- Bit.ai
Bit.ai: Documentation tool for researchers
Online research means going through numerous websites, articles, blogs, images, videos, infographics, and more to find what you are looking for.
For our dynamic, interactive, and media-rich research, we need a tool that incorporates all facets of modern-day research under one roof. Simple text editors of the past just won’t cut it anymore! This is where Bit comes in.
Bit allows researchers and teams to collaborate, share, track, and manage all knowledge and research in one place.
It’s the perfect research tool to share multi-dimensional research with your peers and not just plain, boring text and slides.
Add articles, PDFs, videos, white papers, ebooks, audio samples- basically anything you can think of – and share it with your peers easily!
Other notable features of Bit include:
An easy-to-use, minimal editor that supports Markdown.
Collaborative, real-time editing, and communication with peers.
Add any type of digital content (images, videos, etc) to your Bit document.
A content library to save all your media files for quick access.
Smart search, allows anyone to search and find any files, images, documents, links, etc quickly.
All-in-all, Bit is a must-have writing tool for researchers and authors!
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Key Features of Bit:
Workspaces to store different research content easily
Content library to store media assets
Real-time collaboration with fellow researchers
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from Pro ($8/month), Business ($15/month), Enterprise (contact sales)
Read more: Scientific Paper: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps and Format)
- elink.io
elink.io: Tool for researchers
Research often involves going through hundreds of links and articles and compiling them in one safe space for future reference or publishing them for your audience.
This is why many researchers use bookmarking and curation tools like elink to quickly save their links under one roof and share them with their peers.
elink makes it easy for researchers to save content from around the web. They can save article links, videos, cloud files, social media posts, and much more!
Researchers have the option of saving content to their link library or adding them directly to content collections and sharing their research with their peers. To make the bookmarking process a breeze, elink also has a chrome extension.
Simply click on the extension or right-click on any webpage to save the content directly to your elink dashboard.
Researchers can edit the title and description to add their own voices or notes. They can even bundle links together and share their link collection with others as a newsletter or embed the collection on your blog/website!
Key Features of elink:
Save links quickly using the chrome extension
Create and share research links as a newsletter or embed it on your website
Easy user-interface
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start at Pro Monthly ($15/month), Pro 1 Year ($12/month), and Pro 2 years ($10/month).
- GanttPRO
GanttPRO: Tool for researchers
No matter what kind of research you do, you need to organize, plan, and stay focused on all of your activities.
Without a robust planning tool, researchers may fall behind the schedule and lose their progress.
GanttPRO project and task management tool makes it easy for single researchers and groups of any size to plan their tasks on a visually appealing Gantt chart timeline, follow their progress, and all the deadlines.
GanttPRO allows researchers to create a limitless number of tasks, groups of tasks, and subtasks on one timeline.
Besides, it’s a perfect planning tool for assigning tasks to your fellow researchers or creating virtual resources, whoever or whatever they may be. The software is a good choice for collaboration, time tracking, as well as sharing and exporting your schedules.
Key Features of GanttPRO:
Dozens of ready-made templates.
Real-time collaboration with fellow researchers.
Elegant user interface with a short learning curve.
Pricing:
Free 14-day trial with all features available.
Paid plans start from Team ($4.5/user/month), Individual ($15/month), Enterprise (contact sales).
- Grammarly
Grammarly: Writing tool for researchers
Research work often involves hours of proofreading and spellchecking to make your research professional.
Grammarly, a writing enhancement tool will save you a ton of time and effort doing this dreaded task! Apart from basic spellchecking and corrections, Grammarly includes a grammar checker, a punctuation checker, a vocabulary enhancer, and even a plagiarism checker tool!
This awesome tool scans your research for more than 250 types of grammar mistakes in six distinct writing genres and leaves you with error-free writing. With thorough explanations for all your errors and weekly progress reports.
Grammarly is a must-have tool for researchers. It’s available as a browser extension, a desktop app, a web-based app, and a Microsoft add-in. Many of the Grammarly alternatives are also available in the market that is equally good.
Key Features of Grammarly:
Works with the majority of online tools like Word, Slack, etc.
Plagiarism checker tool
Tone detector
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from: Premium ($11.66/month), Business ($12.50/month)
Read more: 10 Best Writing Apps To Make You A Better Writer!
- Typeset.io
Typeset.io: Researcher’s toolTypeset.io claims to be the smarter alternative to Word and Latex that all researchers should be using. Start off your research with an easy-to-use interface or import your existing Word files.
With over 100,000+ verified journal formats to choose from, Typeform makes the process of research a bit too easy! Quickly copy-paste or upload your paper on Typeset and follow any citation style you need.
Typeset also has a plagiarism and grammar checker built in to ensure your writing is error-free. Once done uploading and citing, click on autoformat to generate your report in seconds.
You can also download your research in PDF, Docx, LaTeX file, or even as a Zip file. With collaboration features built-in, you can invite your fellow researchers to the platform and work together.
Key Features of Typeset:
Over 100,000+ journal formats to choose from
Plagiarism and grammar checker tool
Editing services to improve your publication chances
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from: Researcher ($8/month), Team($6/month), Journals / Publishers (contact sales)
- Scrivener
Scrivener: Writing tool for researchers
Scrivener is another great tool for research writing and keeping your notes organized.
Used by researchers, screenwriters, novelists, non-fiction writers, students, journalists, academics, lawyers, translators, and more, Scrivener is a tool made for long writing projects.
On signing up, you are quickly presented with its editor, with a sidebar to keep everything in place. You can also break your content into manageable sections of any size and leave Scrivener to join them together.
For novelists and storytellers, there’s also a corkboard to visualize your storyline and move cards around as you like.
The outliner keeps a synopsis of what you have already written, along with word count data and metadata. Users can arrange their research articles and other files in folders and subfolders.
Key Features of Scrivener:
Desktop and mobile apps
Outline creator
Easy organization
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from $40.84/one-time fee
- ProofHub
ProofHub: Tool for researchers
You must organize, prepare, and stay focused on all of your efforts, regardless of the type of research you conduct.
Researchers may go behind schedule and lose progress if they don’t have a good task management tool. ProofHub is an all-in-one project and team management application that allows research teams and organizations of any size to efficiently plan their research projects in one spot.
ProofHub allows you to create, assign and track tasks using effective task management features like Kanban boards and table view. Researchers can also get a visual idea of how their project is progressing using robust Gantt charts.
ProofHub also allows you to store and jot down all the data or information collected through your research in Notes. You can even create different notebooks and store your information according to the topic. Not just that, you can even share your research work with your team members.
Teams can also share and store files, documents, and images in ProofHub’s files section. Managers can track their team’s time spent on a specific research task using automatic and manual timers.
Team members can also brainstorm ideas or have real-time discussions in ProofHub’s discussions section and make way for better research work.
Key features of ProofHub:
Ready to use project templates
Task management
Time tracking and project reporting
Team collaboration (chat, notes, and discussions)
File management
Online proofing
Pricing:
14-day free trial with all the features.
- Google Scholar
Google scholar for research work
Next up is an amazing research tool by Google called Google Scholar. Google Scholar provides a quick way to broadly search for scholarly literature from one location.
Look for articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, from professional societies, online repositories, universities, academic publishers, and other websites.
Researchers can also explore related works, citations, authors, and publications easily. Create a public author profile and see who’s citing your recent publication. Google Scholar also allows its users to keep up with recent developments in any area of research.
Key Features of Google Scholar:
Create a public author page
Look for information across Google’s database
Easy to use
Pricing:
Free to use
- Endnote
Endnote for formatting reserch reports
Endnote wants you to research smarter by simplifying the tiresome work of formatting bibliographies, finding full text, and searching for references.
Endnote is collaborative in nature as it allows you to share selected groups of references, manage team access, and track activity and changes from one single dashboard.
With smarter insights, Endnote automatically finds the impact of your references and finds the best-fit journal for your papers.
The platform also enables users to automatically create, format, and update bibliographies. Quickly export your references and full-text PDFs into EndNote and start working instantly.
With a bunch of EndNote templates and plug-ins, researchers can enhance their Endnote experience and get the most out of the platform.
Key Features of Endnote:
Import filters for prior research
Track your teammates’ activity on your shared library
Automatic reference and link updating
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from $249
- Evernote
Evernote: To do list for researchers
Evernote is a note-taking app that can be very useful while conducting research. The app helps you store all your personal ideas, to-do listsm4, notes, and research links in one place.
Create separate tags and folders for the different types of information you are saving and keep it all organized.
Evernote auto-syncs across all your devices, including desktop, smartphone, and tablet, so you can switch between devices without losing your data.
Its Chrome browser extension called the Evernote web clipper is a great add-on for saving articles or other content on the internet while doing your research.
Just click the browser extension to save the entire page or highlights to your Evernote notebook along with any notes you have about that page.
Key Features of Evernote:
Keep notes, articles, and other content in one place
Chrome extension for clipping content
Set reminders
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from Plus ($34.99 per year or $3.99 per month), Premium ($69.99 per year or $7.99 per month), and Evernote Business (contact sales)
- Mendeley
Mendeley: Reference management software for researchers
Mendeley is a reference management software that allows researchers to create references, citations, and bibliographies in multiple journal styles with just a few clicks.
Quickly access your library from anywhere – from anywhere. Windows, Mac, Linux, etc and add papers directly from your browser with a few clicks or import any documents from your desktop to your library.
With its research network, researchers connect and network with over 6 million users. Users can create groups to carry out discussions, discover research, and follow curated bibliographies.
There are also over 250,000 + science, technology, and health jobs to advance your career and grant info from over 5000 organizations to fund your next research!
Key Features of Mendeley:
Annotate and organize documents
Find and create groups with fellow researchers
Grant information from over 5000 organizations
Pricing:
Free with limited functionality
Paid plans start from $55/year for 5 GB to $165/year to unlimited storage
- ContentMine
Content mine: Tool for content mining
ContentMine offers a variety of text mining services to help researchers find, download, analyze, and extract knowledge from academic papers.
ContentMine builds its own open-source code to help out researchers find papers and not waste time on the internet doing so. They can also convert academic papers, PDFs to HTML, or to almost any format.
ContentMine can also extract data from tables and graphs, reducing the time taken to conduct a meta-analysis. The platform also offers consultancy as well as training workshops to educate people on the work they do and how.
Key Features of ContentMine:
Extract data from tables and graphs
Quickly mine text from hundreds of papers
Workshops and training
Pricing:
Contact sales
- ResearchGate
Researchgate tool for research publications
The last tool on our list of awesome tools for researchers is a platform called ResearchGate. ResearchGate gives you access to over 135 million publication pages, allowing you to stay up to date with what’s happening in your field.
With a built-in community, researchers can share their research, collaborate with peers, and discover new papers and bibliographies.
ResearchGate also provides deep analytics on who’s been reading your work and keeps track of your citations. With over 17 million users, ResearchGate is a research community to join!
Key Features of ResearchGate:
Share and find researchers
Analytics to see who’s reading your work
Citation tracking
Pricing:
Free
Before you go!
Our team at bit.ai has created a few awesome templates to make your research process more efficient. Make sure to check them out before you go, your team might need them!
Case Study Template
Research Paper Template
Competitor Research Template
Brainstorming Template
SWOT Analysis Template
White Paper Template
Final Words
There you have it folks, our list of amazing websites, apps, and software to use while conducting your research. Research is hard work- from finding and managing content to organizing and publishing- research takes a lot of time and effort.
However, with our awesome list of tools, researchers are surely going to get out the most of their time and effort and get work done more efficiently. Did we miss any awesome tool for researchers out there? Let us know by tweeting us at @bit_docs.
apps for scientific journals
I recently taught a fun workshop called “Mobile Apps for Research and Education.” We talked about some apps to access library databases, then shared some favorite apps for getting work done.
The mobile apps for accessing library resources are always a bit weird. Because libraries and institutions pay lots of money for access to databases from Proquest, Ebsco, Elsevier, etc., their mobile apps and websites need to have a way of figuring out that the mobile user is associated with one of those institutions. They do this in a variety of ways, some of which are annoying all the time and some of which are annoying just once in a while.
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Some of these apps or websites allow you to search for and find out that an article exists, and perhaps learn a bit about the article (an abstract): The PubMed mobile website is like this. Other apps allow you to access the full text content of a particular article, but aren’t very good at searching: The ACS Mobile app allows you full text access to current research.
I’ve seen various methods of authenticating users. Some require you to sign up for an account via your desktop computer while on your institution’s network, then sign into the same account on the mobile platform. Hopefully they don’t make you sign in each time. Others require you to be on the campus network with your smart phone, or to use a mobile VPN to access content. I’m seeing less of this lately, which is great because this is a really annoying way to use these apps. I really liked the way that Ebsco handled authentication: From the desktop app, you click on a link and Ebsco sends an email with an authentication link. You open the email on your mobile device and get access for 9 months to the app – no need to sign in over and over, and you don’t even need a user account if you don’t want one.
Of course, doing big time research on these apps isn’t the main goal – it would be slow and cumbersome to do your research primarily on a tiny handheld device. But for quick look ups in meetings and while out and about, these apps and websites can be incredibly useful.
Here is a small list of apps and mobile websites for accessing scholarly information on your mobile device. All of the apps listed are free to download, but may require a user to be affiliated with an institutional subscriber in order to access content. (Note that this list tends to be iOS-centric because I don’t have an Android device. Sorry.)
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Ebscohost
Platforms: iOS, Android, Web
Description: Access full text articles and article abstracts from a large number of library databases that use the Ebsco platform (GeoRef, Business Source Complete, Greenfile, etc.). To get access, visit one of your library’s Ebsco databases (like Academic Search Complete) and click the “EBSCOhost iPhone and Android Applications” link at the bottom of the page. You’ll get an email that you need to open up on your phone/device and tap the authentication link. The app will work on campus and off campus, no matter which network you are on.
Sciverse Scopus Alerts
Platforms: iOS, Web
Description: Search the Scopus database for article abstracts and citations. Get search and citation alerts. Users must register first at Scopus, then log in on the app with the Scopus username and password.
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arXiv
Platforms: iOS
Description: Free full text access to the pre-prints available at the arXiv.org website in Physics, Mathematics, Nonlinear Sciences, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, and Statistics.
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iResearch
Platform: iOS
Description: Full text access to American Institute of Physics Journals. Requires an individual subscription or an institutional subscription to access full text.
PubMed
Platform: Mobile website, iOS apps (PubMed On Tap, PubMed4Hh)
Description: PubMed is a free index to the biomedical literature, with links to publishers websites for (paid) full text and links to PubMedCentral for free full text (where available). Several apps can be used to access PubMed and create lists or do more complex searching.
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SciFinder
Platform: Mobile website
Description: For those affiliated with an institution with access, you’ll need your SciFinder username and password to look up journal literature or look for chemical information by substance name or CAS registry number. Chemical structure searching isn’t available on the mobile site.
ACS Mobile
Platform: iOS
Description: Access recent articles from your favorite ACS publications. Requires the user to be on the institutional network or VPN, or requires an individual subscription for full text access. Non-subscribers can still browse article abstracts. Good for discovering recent work, not great for searching the archive of ACS publications.
GeoScienceWorld
Platform: Mobile website
Description: Users from institutions with a subscription can browse and read the geoscience literature. Read the HTML version of an article (much easier on a mobile device) or download (or email) the PDF. Authentication requires users to get an authentication key while on an institutional network before using the site off-network, which is a bit confusing.
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Google Scholar
Platform: Mobile website
Description: Any mobile user can search Google Scholar for free, and often get access to freely available documents. If you are using your mobile device at your institution, and if your institution has configured their Google Scholar library links, you will also see links connecting you to library resources. You can set up these links for yourself under “Settings” (for the mobile and desktop versions). This website is great for discovering content, but when you click on an article title you enter the publishers website that may or may not be mobile friendly.
Obviously, I’ve left a lot out – apps and mobile websites for individual publications, apps for collecting and analyzing scientific data, etc. Do you use your mobile device to read or search the scientific literature? What apps or mobile websites do you use ? Leave your suggestions and recommendations in the comments below.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
author-avatar
Bonnie J. M. Swoger is a Science and Technology Librarian at a small public undergraduate institution in upstate New York, SUNY Geneseo. She teaches students about the science literature, helps faculty and students with library research questions and leads library assessment efforts. She has a BS in Geology from St. Lawrence University, an MS in Geology from Kent State University and an MLS from the University at Buffalo. She would love to have some free time in which to indulge in hobbies. She blogs at the Undergraduate Science Librarian and can be found on twitter @bonnieswoger. Follow Bonnie Swoger on Twitter
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