The Best Research Tools For Successful Students
- 04/15/2019
- Guest Author
- University Advice
Good research skills are essential if you want to be a successful student. They will come in handy when you will work on any sort of research paper and then while working on your dissertation. The Internet, of course, has the abundance of information to offer you, but not even a half of it should be trusted. Research skill is something that you have to learn on your own. Acquiring this skill requires some time and effort, so don’t expect to become an excellent researcher right away. But how can you start? What tools can you use to develop research skills and use them to their fullest capacity? Here are 6 the best tools for successful students.
EndNote
This is a multifunctional tool to help you better organise your research, and it is recommended by universities such as Texas A&M University. The features it provides help you look for information in the online databases as well as insert an abstract to search the whole text. This tool helps you store as many documents as you want, and share them with your collaborators in case you’re working in a team of fellow students. It also manages and stores all the references and automatically builds a bibliography you need for your research paper. It sorts all the references, as well as the documents you’ve saved. This app is not only a perfect research tool, but it also helps you organise your work effectively.Todoist
Do you often get distracted while researching online? This tool comes with a distraction-free design to help you concentrate even better. “Whenever I write my essays while doing my research I get easily distracted by the ads on the websites”, says Andrew Garfield, a student. “IT forced me to look for a tool that will help me avoid distraction, and I came across Todoist.” Besides a distraction-free design, this tool also offers you other cool features like the accessibility of your work on every device you own, sharing your work with your collaborators if you work in a team and various reminders and filters to better organise your work process.RefWorks
This online tool was created primarily for students to help them find necessary resources. It also works as an organisational tool and can store all your research results. It also has a feature that allows you to share work with your team and easily access it from every device. If you’re worried about how to cite works correctly, you can avoid spending hours putting your references together, as this tool does it for you automatically. If you have any difficulty using this tool, there are various tutorials describing the ways how to use this tool to its fullest capacity.DeepDyve
While doing a research you’ll probably search for some books and journals, but to actually see them requires a payment. But if you don’t want to buy a pig in a poke and wish to see at least a full abstract to the book or journal, DeepDyve can help you with that. Moreover, this tool allows you to access a book or any necessary periodical for a short period of time, which is enough to figure out whether this information will be useful for your paper. This tool also has built-in organisation features to help you sort the articles and store them. You can use a trial period to see whether this tool fits you, and then choose between the monthly plan or the annual plan to use this tool to its full capacity.Internet Public Library
Need trusted sources? There’s no better place than the library to offer you the best quality information you need. But if you’re running out of time and can’t visit an actual library, there’s an online one. Internet public library offers you a great collection of online resources that are categorised by subject. It has all the features of a usual library including cataloging, referencing, archives, and special collections. You can also find governments documents here, as well as blogs on every subject.Project Gutenberg
Named after Johannes Gutenberg who introduced the printing press to Europe, this tool is one of the most famous and used ones. It offers you access to over 20,000 books and articles and is one of the largest collections of online books. So here you can find most things you need for your research. If 20,000 books don’t seem enough or you cannot find the book you need, this tool will redirect you to other free online resources and makes over 100,000 books accessible to you.Conclusion
Students are often very busy, so the Internet sometimes becomes their only hope to complete the assignment. But making a quality work using online resources can sometimes be very difficult. Hopefully, these digital tools will help you write your essays and research papers effortlessly and also help you work on your research skills.Tom Jager is professional blogger. He works at A writer. He has degree in Law and English literature. Tom has written numerous articles/online journals.
