Research Tools You Can Use

Recently I discovered several new (at least to me) research tools that can make searching and organizing your articles a lot easier. The first is the Google Scholar extension for Chrome and Firefox. Some of you may already be using it, but for those who aren't, here's a quick (unprofessional) demo of how it works. Pretty slick. It shouldn't take the place of in-depth searching in a database but for basic searching it's great.

Many of you know I have been an advocate for the citation management tool Zotero for years. I hate to say it but I think I have found an even better tool in ReadCube. It has most of the Zotero features I love except the drag and drop reference list creation. But then it has a whole bunch of new features that will make life easier for any researcher. Here's a quick overview of the product.

You can easily import .pdfs including entire libraries from Zotero or Endnote. In fact if you set up a folder, ReadCube will monitor that folder and anything you add to the folder will be automatically added to ReadCube. It will automatically search Google Scholar and PubMed for additional articles by an author or for references. If you read the document within ReadCube you can annotate the article and the annotations can be searched. There is a Word plug in for citation or you can export to Zotero or Endnote, although I'm not sure why that would be easier. Finally, the Pro version ($5/month, $45/yr.) you get unlimited cloud storage, syncing across all platforms/devices, plus advanced citation metrics for an article. Free apps are available for both iOS and Android.

There is one caveat, the program is designed to work with enhanced .pdfs so some of the features may not work on older .pdfs and other formats. But it is a relatively new product, I suspect there will be further enhancements. 

Try it, I think you will like it. And don't forget to tell your doc students about it.