It’s currently dissertation for those of us on postgraduate programmes and needless to say I’m sure many of us are coming down with a bad case of writer’s block. Or maybe, you’re unable to deal with the information overload. Whatever it is you find yourself struggling with, instead of sitting around and pulling your hair out like in the olden days, it’s time to appreciate the help of technology and the internet. Remember to save the following links:
Scite: This tool helps provide Smart Citations which allows users to view how a publication has been cited and hence outlines its context and illustrates if the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. Consequently, researchers can better evaluate articles and rest assured that these sources are reputable and reliable.
RefSeek: A web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information accessible to everyone. Basically the Google of the academic world since it searches the entire collection of web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals and newspapers on your chosen topic. The engines searches freely available academic information while filtering out most commercial content.
ScienceDirect: The world’s premier platform for peer-reviewed literature offers a wide range of easily downloadable and highly multidisciplinary papers. If your topic of consideration examines the intersection between science and policy for example or if you’re studying courses with many overlaps like anthropology or international development, this platform should definitely be at the top of your list!
Semantic Scholar: This AI-driven search and discovery tool opens resources for the global research community by providing summaries for scholarly papers while blocking out irrelevant sources and distractions. No need for any more of those countless skim reads of abstracts, introductions and conclusions or the discussion section!
Google Scholar Metrics: An easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications in broad subject areas and various subcategories. This is done through the use of h-indexes which are used to show how influential or productive the researcher is by combining both the quality and quantity of their previous scholarly pursuits. What’s great is that there are also 9 languages to choose from so you might benefit from an expanded range of articles in the other languages that you are able to command.
Connected Papers: If you want a tool that helps you cut down the time you spend searching and reading through academic papers before you find something that is useful for your write-up, look no further because this powerful and clever visualisation platform will do just that. It also never fails to keep you updated on the latest research developments so you can bring fresh insight to your work.
One more thing, these websites also list the end-text references for the papers you would have used and you can choose the formats (APA, Harvard, Chicago, MLA, etc) which would save you time as compared to manually doing these.
