Academics websites
The web is a treasure trove of resources that can make the life of researchers and academics much easier. Here, I discuss my favourites.
Keeping up-to-date
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a great resource for quick literature searches. It is much more intuitive than “proper” research databases like PubMed or PsychINFO, because it uses the same logical operators as regular Google. So, you can combine several keywords with AND and add wildcards like attent* to search for anything starting with “attent” like attention and attentive. You can also create your own profile to make your work more easily discoverable. That’s easily done in a few clicks. Subsequently, Google Scholar will recommend articles that are similar to your own published articles. This can be quite useful to stay on top of the literature.
ResearchGate
ResearchGate is similar to a social media platform but it’s solely dedicated to research. You can create a profile for yourself, add your papers, and follow the updates of other researchers. It also has forums to ask for answers from other researchers. Seeing the updates from other researchers can be very useful to see what other people are working on. In contrast to discovering papers via search engines, the papers on ResearchGate can be added to projects. So, you can easily se how the most recent preprint from a lab relates to their previous papers. I also like that ResearchGate produces reports about who viewed or cited my papers so I can connect to people with similar interests. Fortunately, curating the profile does not take a lot of work. In most cases, ResearchGate will suggest adding papers automatically once they are published.
Connected Papers
Connected Papers is a discovery tool that is extremely useful when exploring a new area. For example, you might have come across an inspiring article and want to learn more about the context of this research. Connected Papers will present you with a graph of the most closely related papers. You can also view the graph in a timeline to see which recent articles relate to this work. I find this extremely useful when I have to present a seminar on a topic that I have not followed for a while. It’s also great when writing papers. I usually look up if there are any more recent articles that I might have missed via Connected Papers.
Research Rabbit
Research Rabbit is a relatively new tool designed to help researchers with staying on top of the literature. You can add papers to reading lists. The papers are then digested by Research Rabbit’s algorithm that then recommends similar articles. The articles are displayed in interactive views that make it easy to explore links and add interesting articles to the reading list. The best feature for me is that Research Rabbit sends weekly emails with new papers that may be of interest based on the existing library. The recommendations are usually spot on and helped me to discover articles that I would have otherwise missed.
Doing Science
Prolific
Prolific is an online platform for participant recruitment. Prolific makes it easy to advertise studies to a huge sample of participants who have been pre-screened on various dimensions. For instance, I recently needed a representative sample of 1,000 people from the UK for a short questionnaire study. I could recruit the entire sample, representative of the UK population based on gender, ethnicity, and age according to census data, within 2 days. Prolific integrates with many commonly used online research platforms like Gorilla and Qualtrics. Of course, it’s also possible to host studies on university servers and direct Prolific participants to them via a link.
For people new to online research, Prolific hosts a large community of researchers from around the world that also includes dedicated community ambassadors. Whenever I had questions about any aspect of web-based research, I got excellent answers from the community within hours.
Gorilla
Gorilla is an online experiment builder that is especially useful for anyone who wants to run online experiments but does not want to dive deep into JavaScript or does not have access to a dedicated server for running web-based studies. Gorilla provides tools to build anything from questionnaires to sophisticated cognitive tasks. Should the tools of Gorilla not suffice, it’s possible to integrate custom JavaScript code, e.g. to add elements using the JSPsych library. It’s even possible to collect reliable reaction time measures via Gorilla, as has recently been shown in an analysis that compared web-based and local measures (see Anwyl-Irvine et al. 2020 Behavior Research Methods). The best thing about Gorilla is that it’s easy to use and accessible, thank to their great documentation. I supervised groups of undergraduate students who had no experience with programming and who could implement simple routines in Gorilla within a few hours. They could also collect online data independently after minimal instruction, which would be a lot harder to do with a home-made server solution.
Open Science Framework
Most researchers will have heard about the Open Science Framework in the context of open science and reproducibility. It is an extremely useful tool for that. For instance, it’s quite straightforward to upload data and code that can be shared with peer-reviewers via anonymised links. But, there are also other use cases and features for OSF that go beyond open science. For instance, OSF repositories can be used as a convenient and secure database that can be shared with collaborators. In addition, OSF contains documentation and resources for better data and code management, including a version history. Your future self will thank you for using OSF’s structures and tools!
Github
Github is widely known for collaborative code development, but it can be used more generally for project management. The basis of this is a command-line tool called git, which is used for version control on your local computer. You attach git to a folder on your local computer. When you make some significant changes, you can commit the changes to the version history and add a short comment about the changes that you made. You can then connect the local version history to Github. That can help if you are collaborating with other people. It’s also extremely useful if you work across different computers, e.g. on your laptop and a university server, or when you want to have a backup of your work. The version history is particularly useful if you want to recover an earlier version. For instance, if you are writing some code and realise that you made a mistake at some point that completely breaks it, you can recover an earlier version quite easily to establish where you might have gone wrong.
Teaching & Learning
Coursera
We all need to constantly learn to advance our research and broaden our horizons. Fortunately, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) make that a lot easier and more accessible, compared to the old school method of working through dense textbooks. I tried a few different MOOC platforms and like Coursera by far the best. First, all the courses that I tried were of extremely high quality. They are usually from high-ranking universities, well-thought-out, and produced to a very high standard. Second, almost all courses offer interactive elements like coding exercises, quizzes, or peer-marked assignments. These active elements and the feedback are an enormous help for learning and engagement. Third, Coursera offers certificates at very reasonable prices (typically around £30 for a 4-week course). I’m not sure how employers view this, but the certificates provide an incentive for me and I like adding them to my LinkedIn profile and CV.
YouTube
I use YouTube for two reasons. First, there are many excellent clips that are useful for teaching. There are many superb talks, short documentary segments, or interviews with experts that make great additions to lectures. These video clips can be easily added to presentations or shared via online learning platforms. I use the clips to show real-world examples and break the monotony of the lecture. If the clips are a bit longer, like 2 minutes or more, I usually ask students to answer a few questions to keep them from drifting off. Second, I follow a few YouTube channels that produce content related to my interests. These include learned societies that post interviews and talks, and individuals that share insights and practical tips. For instance, I follow a few channels about personal knowledge management that helped me to elevate my note-taking.
Interested in other tools and resources for researchers and academics? Check out my other articles: The best Mac apps for researchers and academics, The best iPad apps for researchers and academics
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I’m a lecturer in psychology specialised in cognitive neuroscience. Topics: brain and mind, productivity, and academic work flows. More info: www.joebathelt.com
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posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 11:44 AM
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