write research tools

19 Academic Writing Tools (that are completely free!)

A selection of tools for academic writing – from collaborating, time-tracking and project management to finding the perfect phrase or translation. We are continuously updating this list (latest update: April 2023).

I often get asked about my favourite academic writing tools. That’s why I compiled this scientific tools list for you with 19 great tools to support your academic writing. You can use all these scientific research tools for free and some of them have paid versions with additional features.

Just one word of caution: Exploring new academic writing tools can be a time-suck and distract you from getting your actual writing done. If you are one of those people who spend hours signing up for new software for academic writing and getting it set up, only to abandon the tool a few days or weeks later – then be careful reading this scientific tools list, and don’t get overenthusiastic. 😉

By the way, I don’t have any affiliation with any of the academic writing tools listed below, and none of these are affiliated links.

Here, we go, 19 tools for academic writing and scientific research I recommend in no particular order:

ACADEMIC Writing tools

1. writefull.

This proof-reading tool for scientific texts is powered by AI and big data. You can integrate the Writefull app into Word or Overleaf for free. A reader of the blog brought my attention to this tool (thank you so much!) and I’ve only recently started using it, so I can’t give you a full-blown review just yet but so far the results are promising. Writefull is owned by Digital Science, a company that has released several Open Science apps, such as figshare, Overleaf and Altmetric. 

2. Phrasebank

Created by Dr John Morley from “The University Language Center” of Manchester University, the Phrasebank is a database of common phrases used in papers, dissertations and grant proposals – a real goldmine!

The phrases are organised both by the common sections in a paper such as the Introduction, Methods, Results or Discussion section. For example, in the tab for the Introduction section, one can find entries for “establishing the importance of the topic for the world or society” or “identifying a knowledge gap in the field of study”. If you click on the latter, you can find among others the following suggested phrases: “It is still unclear whether…”, “However, the behaviour of X has not yet been investigated” and “Causal factors leading to X remain speculative”.

You can also look for phrases by choosing a general language function. Some of the choices are “being cautious”, “describing trends”, “signalling transition”.   

The Phrasebank is very useful to get inspiration for new wording but I do not endorse all entries. Sometimes you find language that is a bit clunky or overly complicated so do use your own judgement when you browse this academic writing tool. PS: You can also download the Academic Phrasebank as PDF or Kindle file.

3. Thesaurus.com

If you’re looking for synonyms, thesaurus.com is the best online thesaurus I’ve found so far. It divides the synonyms based on different meanings of the word and indicates the relevance of the synonym by using three shades of orange.

Just one word of caution: Don’t fall into the trap of using too many synonyms in your academic writing. Being precise is so much more important than varying the words you are using in your writing. In particular for field-specific terminology, I advise against using synonyms .

This is a hot tip for researchers who need to transcribe interviews (hello, social scientists!), who like to record research ideas or those who like to write by dictating text into their phone. Otter is an AI-based transcription tool that works for English language recordings. The quality of the transcriptions is comparable to other transcription services using AI, meaning they are often not accurate and can give nonsensical, even comical results — especially when the recorded voice has a strong or unusual accent. Still, the automated and quick transcriptions (real time transcriptions are available too!) can be a good starting point and are a huge time saver. What’s cool about Otter compared to its competitors is that they give you 300 minutes of transcriptions per month for free!

There are many online dictionaries but Linguee is my favourite for academic writing. It suggests a translation on the basis of previous translations published on the internet.  Therefore, this dictionary is especially great if you’re looking to not only translate a word but a certain turn of phrase or idiom. Linguee translates to and from English in over 20 languages. An essential academic writing tool for all non-native English speakers!

ACADEMIC WRITING TOOLS FOR Collaboration AND CO-WRITING

6. authorea.

The magazine “ TechCrunch ” describes Authorea as “a Google Docs for scientists”. On the academic writing platform, you can write, edit, and insert citations, figures and data. And it’s great for collaborative writing: Co-authors can access the same text at the same time, track the changes they made, insert comments and even live-chat during writing sessions. Documents can be imported from LaTeX and Word and exported as LaTeX, Word and PDF documents. You can also submit your article as a bioRxiv preprint straight from the Authorea platform. This software for academic writing is free for up to ten documents with limited sharing options.

7. Overleaf

Overleaf is to LaTeX users, what Authorea (see tool #6) is to Word users: an online editor that allows you to access and collaborate on your writing projects from anywhere. You can, for example, invite others to comment on your work. Overleaf offers some other neat collaborative writing features, such as a track-changes function, but – unfortunately – only on the paid plan. LaTeX may seem a bit intimidating at first but you actually get the hang of it quite fast (and feel like a coder 😎). Also, in my experience, you save a lot of time formatting your text (and feel smug about it when you talk to Word users 😁).

Slack is a chat tool that you can use in your lab or with your collaborators. Used in the right way, it allows you to save time by cutting down on emails and create a group atmosphere even if the members are not working in the same location. You can easily add files to the chats and create different channels for subgroups or certain topics. There also exist virtual communities on Slack you can join, such as the New PI Slack community for Assistant professors around the world. 

Loom is a great scientific research tool when you want to share a quick video with a colleague, student or collaborator. This could be a recorded presentation or lecture, your comments on the paper of a co-author, or a tutorial on using a piece of software. You can record your screen, camera and microphone. The neat thing is that after you’re done recording, Loom auto-generates a link you can share.

Academic writing tools for Productivity and project management

Toggl is a time-tracking app that you can install on your phone and computer. There’s only one way of knowing how long certain writing tasks typically take you, and that is by tracking the time they took you to complete . Time-tracking has another great advantage: You can identify time-sucks in your day. And these may be less obvious than you think.

I like to use Toggl for time-tracking because it’s quick to use and integrates with various other scientific research tools I am using. You just need to click the big red power button to start or stop a recording and assign tracked times to different projects. This scientific research tool has paid plans but for most people the free basic plan will be sufficient.

Are you easily tempted to check your phone when you really should be writing? This app called Forest may be just right for you then. Once installed on your phone, you can start planting a virtual tree whenever you want to focus. It grows from a little plant to a full-grown tree. When you pick up your phone and leave the app, the tree dies. This way, you can build your forest representing the time you have spent on focused work (or quality time with your family and friends…). I’m not using Forest myself, but I’ve heard that it works really as an academic writing tool well for some people. Give it a go!  

12. Focusmate

As Forest (see tool #11), Focusmate is an app to help you stay focused. Instead of  gamification, the concept of Focusmate is based on social accountability. Here is how it works: You schedule a 50-minute virtual co-writing session with another Focusmate member, turn on your webcam when your session starts, greet your temporary co-worker and then get to work silently.

Even though being filmed while working is a little strange in the beginning, co-writing sessions work really well for a lot of researchers. This is why we offer co-writing sessions as part of our academic writing program, the Researchers’ Writing Academy, as well.

13. Cold Turkey

If Forest (tool #11) or Focusmate (#12) don’t get you to focus on your writing, you may need to go Cold Turkey . This software for academic writing blocks any other application and turns your computer into a typewriter. You can choose whether you want Cold Turkey to prevent you from digital distractions for a certain amount of time or until you’ve hit a certain word count. With the paid version, you can even access integrated productivity soundtracks and text formatting.

Not an app exactly, but free as well: Click the orange button below to have me walk you through my step-by-step system to write clear & concise papers for your target journals in a timely manner . This free academic writing training is perfect for you if you’re reading this blog post because you are procrastinating on writing your paper.

Trello is an excellent project management tool for your academic writing, which you can use for managing each of your writing projects, for creating a publication pipeline and as a daily and weekly to-do list. Trello is a great introduction into project management because it’s a lot easier to learn and use than most other project management software. For each project called a “Board”, you can create different “lists”, which are vertical collection of “cards”, which you can move between lists. You can add due dates, checklist lists, links, files and text to each card. To work collaboratively, you can leave comments on cards and assign them to members on your team. You can also use Trello as a brainstorming tool, using the cards just as you would use post-it notes.

Members of my online course, the Researchers’ Writing Academy , get access to Trello templates I created to easily manage their publication pipeline, the writing process for each of their scientific papers and all of their other daily, weekly and monthly tasks and projects.

15. Todoist

Todoist is an alternative to Trello (see tool #16) or can be used in addition. It’s an online to-do list organiser and project management tool that comes as an app and browser version. You can organise your tasks in projects and schedule them for a certain day. This academic writing tool shows you today’s tasks as well as those for the next seven days. It also tracks your productivity, i.e. how many tasks you have completed.

academic writing Tools for finding and reading the literature

Feedly is a neat RSS feed manager that helps you stay up to date with the scientific literature. Instead of getting email alerts from journals (because who wants to get more emails…) you can view and organise the literature you are interested in by following journals’ RSS feeds. You can not only use this for scientific literature but also subscribe to blogs, for example the one you’re reading right now, by simply putting the URL in the Feedly search: https://annaclemens.com/blog .

Are you a mindmapper? Then you need Xmind , a free mindmapping and brain-storming tool. It’s intuitive, looks good and does exactly what you want a mindmapping tool to do. The free version allows for embedding of hyperlinks, images, attachments, so you can really use it however you like! That’s all I can really say about it as I’m not using mindmapping myself. But I know scientists who swear by it!

18. Audemic

Audio formats have become so popular (I’m a big podcast lover myself!) so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that there now is an audio tool available for the scientific literature too: Audemic . This tool — completely free to use for individual researchers — creates summaries for you (that go beyond the abstract), lets you skip sections, highlight text and take notes while listening.

There are a few reference managers for your academic writing to choose from, some of which cost money. Zotero is free, open-source and doesn’t lack in functionality. You can easily save references from your browser, organise them in folders and with tags and create bibliographies with the right style. You can also create a citation library with your co-authors or share your library with others.

That’s it: 19 academic writing apps and scientific research tools to support your writing for free! However, the best academic writing software won’t make you more productive if you don’t rely on a streamlined writing process and if you aren’t using your writing sessions effectively. If you want to get your hands on a template to write scientific papers in a systematic fashion, sign up for this 1-hour writing training now. It’s free too!

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Photography by Alice Dix

Top 21 must-have digital tools for researchers

Last updated

12 May 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Research drives many decisions across various industries, including:

Uncovering customer motivations and behaviors to design better products

Assessing whether a market exists for your product or service

Running clinical studies to develop a medical breakthrough

Conducting effective and shareable research can be a painstaking process. Manual processes are sluggish and archaic, and they can also be inaccurate. That’s where advanced online tools can help. 

The right tools can enable businesses to lean into research for better forecasting, planning, and more reliable decisions. 

• Why do researchers need research tools?

Research is challenging and time-consuming. Analyzing data , running focus groups , reading research papers , and looking for useful insights take plenty of heavy lifting. 

These days, researchers can’t just rely on manual processes. Instead, they’re using advanced tools that:

Speed up the research process

Enable new ways of reaching customers

Improve organization and accuracy

Allow better monitoring throughout the process

Enhance collaboration across key stakeholders

• The most important digital tools for researchers

Some tools can help at every stage, making researching simpler and faster.

They ensure accurate and efficient information collection, management, referencing, and analysis. 

Some of the most important digital tools for researchers include:

Research management tools

Research management can be a complex and challenging process. Some tools address the various challenges that arise when referencing and managing papers. 

.css-10ptwjf{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;background:transparent;border:0;color:inherit;cursor:pointer;-webkit-flex-shrink:0;-ms-flex-negative:0;flex-shrink:0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-10ptwjf:disabled{opacity:0.6;pointer-events:none;} Zotero

Coined as a personal research assistant, Zotero is a tool that brings efficiency to the research process. Zotero helps researchers collect, organize, annotate, and share research easily. 

Zotero integrates with internet browsers, so researchers can easily save an article, publication, or research study on the platform for later. 

The tool also has an advanced organizing system to allow users to label, tag, and categorize information for faster insights and a seamless analysis process. 

Messy paper stacks––digital or physical––are a thing of the past with Paperpile. This reference management tool integrates with Google Docs, saving users time with citations and paper management. 

Referencing, researching, and gaining insights is much cleaner and more productive, as all papers are in the same place. Plus, it’s easier to find a paper when you need it. 

Acting as a single source of truth (SSOT), Dovetail houses research from the entire organization in a simple-to-use place. Researchers can use the all-in-one platform to collate and store data from interviews , forms, surveys , focus groups, and more. 

Dovetail helps users quickly categorize and analyze data to uncover truly actionable insights . This helps organizations bring customer insights into every decision for better forecasting, planning, and decision-making. 

Dovetail integrates with other helpful tools like ​Slack, Atlassian, Notion, and Zapier for a truly efficient workflow.

Putting together papers and referencing sources can be a huge time consumer. EndNote claims that researchers waste 200,000 hours per year formatting citations. 

To address the issue, the tool formats citations automatically––simultaneously creating a bibliography while the user writes. 

EndNote is also a cloud-based system that allows remote working, multiple-user interaction and collaboration, and seamless working on different devices. 

Information survey tools

Surveys are a common way to gain data from customers. These tools can make the process simpler and more cost-effective. 

With ready-made survey templates––to collect NPS data, customer effort scores , five-star surveys, and more––getting going with Delighted is straightforward. 

Delighted helps teams collect and analyze survey feedback without needing any technical knowledge. The templates are customizable, so you can align the content with your brand. That way, the survey feels like it’s coming from your company, not a third party. 

SurveyMonkey

With millions of customers worldwide, SurveyMonkey is another leader in online surveys. SurveyMonkey offers hundreds of templates that researchers can use to set up and deploy surveys quickly. 

Whether your survey is about team performance, hotel feedback, post-event feedback, or an employee exit, SurveyMonkey has a ready-to-use template. 

Typeform offers free templates you can quickly embed, which comes with a point of difference: It designs forms and surveys with people in mind, focusing on customer enjoyment. 

Typeform employs the ‘one question at a time’ method to keep engagement rates and completions high. It focuses on surveys that feel more like conversations than a list of questions.

Web data analysis tools

Collecting data can take time––especially technical information. Some tools make that process simpler. 

For those conducting clinical research, data collection can be incredibly time-consuming. Teamscope provides an online platform to collect and manage data simply and easily. 

Researchers and medical professionals often collect clinical data through paper forms or digital means. Those are too easy to lose, tricky to manage, and challenging to collaborate on. 

With Teamscope, you can easily collect, store, and electronically analyze data like patient-reported outcomes and surveys. 

Heap is a digital insights platform providing context on the entire customer journey . This helps businesses improve customer feedback , conversion rates, and loyalty. 

Through Heap, you can seamlessly view and analyze the customer journey across all platforms and touchpoints, whether through the app or website. 

Another analytics tool, Smartlook, combines quantitative and qualitative analytics into one platform. This helps organizations understand user behavior and make crucial improvements. 

Smartlook is useful for analyzing web pages, purchasing flows, and optimizing conversion rates. 

Project management tools

Managing multiple research projects across many teams can be complex and challenging. Project management tools can ease the burden on researchers. 

Visual productivity tool Trello helps research teams manage their projects more efficiently. Trello makes product tracking easier with:

A range of workflow options

Unique project board layouts

Advanced descriptions

Integrations

Trello also works as an SSOT to stay on top of projects and collaborate effectively as a team. 

To connect research, workflows, and teams, Airtable provides a clean interactive interface. 

With Airtable, it’s simple to place research projects in a list view, workstream, or road map to synthesize information and quickly collaborate. The Sync feature makes it easy to link all your research data to one place for faster action. 

For product teams, Asana gathers development, copywriting, design, research teams, and product managers in one space. 

As a task management platform, Asana offers all the expected features and more, including time-tracking and Jira integration. The platform offers reporting alongside data collection methods , so it’s a favorite for product teams in the tech space.

Grammar checker tools

Grammar tools ensure your research projects are professional and proofed. 

No one’s perfect, especially when it comes to spelling, punctuation, and grammar. That’s where Grammarly can help. 

Grammarly’s AI-powered platform reviews your content and corrects any mistakes. Through helpful integrations with other platforms––such as Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, and LinkedIn––it’s simple to spellcheck as you go. 

Another helpful grammar tool is Trinka AI. Trinka is specifically for technical and academic styles of writing. It doesn’t just correct mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar; it also offers explanations and additional information when errors show. 

Researchers can also use Trinka to enhance their writing and:

Align it with technical and academic styles

Improve areas like syntax and word choice

Discover relevant suggestions based on the content topic

Plagiarism checker tools

Avoiding plagiarism is crucial for the integrity of research. Using checker tools can ensure your work is original. 

Plagiarism checker Quetext uses DeepSearch™ technology to quickly sort through online content to search for signs of plagiarism. 

With color coding, annotations, and an overall score, it’s easy to identify conflict areas and fix them accordingly. 

Duplichecker

Another helpful plagiarism tool is Duplichecker, which scans pieces of content for issues. The service is free for content up to 1000 words, with paid options available after that. 

If plagiarism occurs, a percentage identifies how much is duplicate content. However, the interface is relatively basic, offering little additional information.  

Journal finder tools

Finding the right journals for your project can be challenging––especially with the plethora of inaccurate or predatory content online. Journal finder tools can solve this issue. 

Enago Journal Finder

The Enago Open Access Journal Finder sorts through online journals to verify their legitimacy. Through Engao, you can discover pre-vetted, high-quality journals through a validated journal index. 

Enago’s search tool also helps users find relevant journals for their subject matter, speeding up the research process. 

JournalFinder

JournalFinder is another journal tool that’s popular with academics and researchers. It makes the process of discovering relevant journals fast by leaning into a machine-learning algorithm.

This is useful for discovering key information and finding the right journals to publish and share your work in. 

Social networking for researchers

Collaboration between researchers can improve the accuracy and sharing of information. Promoting research findings can also be essential for public health, safety, and more. 

While typical social networks exist, some are specifically designed for academics.

ResearchGate

Networking platform ResearchGate encourages researchers to connect, collaborate, and share within the scientific community. With 20 million researchers on the platform, it's a popular choice. 

ResearchGate is founded on an intention to advance research. The platform provides topic pages for easy connection within a field of expertise and access to millions of publications to help users stay up to date. 

Academia is another commonly used platform that connects 220 million academics and researchers within their specialties. 

The platform aims to accelerate research with discovery tools and grow a researcher’s audience to promote their ideas. 

On Academia, users can access 47 million PDFs for free. They cover topics from mechanical engineering to applied economics and child psychology. 

• Expedited research with the power of tools

For researchers, finding data and information can be time-consuming and complex to manage. That’s where the power of tools comes in. 

Manual processes are slow, outdated, and have a larger potential for inaccuracies. 

Leaning into tools can help researchers speed up their processes, conduct efficient research, boost their accuracy, and share their work effectively. 

With tools available for project and data management, web data collection, and journal finding, researchers have plenty of assistance at their disposal.

When it comes to connecting with customers, advanced tools boost customer connection while continually bringing their needs and wants into products and services.

What are primary research tools?

Primary research is data and information that you collect firsthand through surveys, customer interviews, or focus groups. 

Secondary research is data and information from other sources, such as journals, research bodies, or online content. 

Primary researcher tools use methods like surveys and customer interviews. You can use these tools to collect, store, or manage information effectively and uncover more accurate insights. 

What is the difference between tools and methods in research?

Research methods relate to how researchers gather information and data. 

For example, surveys, focus groups, customer interviews, and A/B testing are research methods that gather information. 

On the other hand, tools assist areas of research. Researchers may use tools to more efficiently gather data, store data securely, or uncover insights. 

Tools can improve research methods, ensuring efficiency and accuracy while reducing complexity.

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous research faster?

Do you share your research findings with others?

Do you analyze research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

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11 Best Academic Writing Tools For Researchers

For many people, the academic writing process can be a daunting and exhausting experience. Papers and reports can take hours or days to complete and require intense dedication to perfect. However, there are tools that can make the process much easier for those who need them most. It is crucial to maintain academic integrity while leveraging these AI writing tools to ensure the quality and authenticity of your work.

This article is organized into roughly 3 stages of writing:

Organizing the manuscript

Summary 💡 Use Jasper to get unstuck – ask it to brainstorm or write an outline for you  ✍️ Use ProWritingAid or Trinka to check and edit your paper 📖 Use QuillBot to rephrase or summarize your research 🤓 Check your essay readability with Hemingway Editor 📁 Use Scrivener or LaTex to organize your manuscript for your masterpiece Editor

Table of Contents

I. Best AI Writing Tools for Researchers

#1. jasper (formerly jarvis) – game-changing ai writing bot.

Jasper is an AI-powered writing assistant that can help you with different parts of your writing. Jasper can identify the core argument in your writing and will provide an outline, create a title, and offer to write introductions and conclusions.

Here is the deep dive review article on Jasper

There are ~60 templates that can help you with the less hardcore research work that takes up your time

Flexible pay-as-you-go. To start with, Jarvis gives you some credits (5,000 in my case) for free. So, test Jarvis and pay for what you use

Unused credits are not allowed to carry over to the next month. I wish it’s more like the Audible model, where you can save up the credit later on.

Update: Jasper is giving a one-off 10,000 words for free for five days to our readers. Check it out before it expires.

#2. ProWritingAid – Your paper enhancer before submission

As someone who works in academia, I understand the importance of producing quality writing that is clear, concise, and accurate. That’s why I love using ProWritingAid, an AI writing assistant that helps me perfect my work before submission.

Overall, ProWritingAid is a powerful tool that can help you produce quality writing quickly and efficiently.

Learning tool for students that provides in-depth analysis to get your work publish-ready

While I love the detailed report feature, some users may find these functions overwhelming at first

#3. [Trinka ](https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=1568234&u=3086661&m=98815&urllink=&afftrack=)– Designed for Academic Writing and Technical writing

It aids academics and professionals in ensuring that their writing is clear, succinct, and interesting.

Consistency Check that’s made for scientific writing

Free version limits word count to 10,000 words/month

#4. Hemingway Editor – free and powerful

Helps you spot your prose’s pitfalls, e.g., passive voice and convoluted sentence structure

Helps improve reading comprehension and understanding  

Can’t export to MS Word or PDF files

II. Best Re-Writing Software

#1. quillbot – best paid option for the professional .

One of the primary strengths of this tool is that it uses machine learning to understand, reword, restructure, and improve on the paraphrases it makes. Besides paraphrasing and cutting your writing time, QuillBot offers a built-in thesaurus function to help you find the perfect word every time and change individual words.

Good interface that shows you the words that have been spun, not just shows you the result

Has a Grammar Checker that rivals Grammarly with a one-click fix-it function

Premium starts with $15 billed monthly and $9.99 per month (billed every 6 months)

#2. WordTune – The most convenient option

Works as a Google Extension which I use for my daily needs

To change the tone to casual or formal requires an upgrade

#3. Spinbot – Best free option for starters

Credit: from the author at scijournal.org 

The interface is simple, spotless, and straightforward to use, but it includes offers. When you get past the commercials, though, the summarizing method is simple

#1. Scrivener – Best for Academic Researchers

Scrivener is great for researchers who need to handle a large volume of research. As an AI research assistant, it helps organize your research and thoughts. Academic writing is more complicated than a grad school writing assignment. This tool costs a little bit of money. But, many top researchers use it for their research papers.

Ease of use – allows you to easily rearrange your chapters and organize your research paper later without worrying about the order

Interface in the documents can be a bit confusing for first-time users

That’s right, you won’t have to leave your writing tool if you need to upload a research paper or just an article.

Can use Authorea with Scrivener

#3. Reedsy – Best for Aspiring Best-Selling Authors

Reedsy’s eBook Editor has all the features of an advanced word processor, meaning you can write your eBook with the same high-powered tools that are used by best-selling authors.

#4. LaTeX – Great tool but difficult for non-coder  

Download the LaTeX program here , and don’t forget to check out our guide on how to use it here .

#5. DraftIn – Minimalistic and free for laser-focus writing  

This is different from Google Docs’ showing the updated version and you figure out what has been changed. And, revert them one by one.

Version control is very helpful for keeping track of edits and updates

Limited functions (by design) compared with other tools

Share them with us below!

Why should I use LaTeX?

What are the best tips for academic writing.

3. Try using different words than the ones you found in your research

8. Mix it up in terms of PUNCTUATION 

What are the tools for effective writing?

The most important tool is your mind as a researcher.

10 thoughts on “11 Best Academic Writing Tools For Researchers”

Top 13 Tools for Researchers in 2024!

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.

1. Bit.ai  

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!

Key Features of Bit: 

• Workspaces to store different research content easily
• Content library to store media assets
• Real-time collaboration with fellow researchers
• Free with limited functionality
• Paid plans start from Pro ($8/month), Business ($15/month), Enterprise (contact sales)

Read more:  How Bit.ai Can Help You Manage Your Academic Research?

2. elink.io

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
• Paid plans start at Pro Monthly ($15/month), Pro 1 Year ($12/month), and Pro 2 years ($10/month).

3. GanttPRO

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.
•   Free 14-day trial with all features available.
• Paid plans start from Team ($4.5/user/month), Individual ($15/month), Enterprise (contact sales).

4. Grammarly

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
• Paid plans start from: Premium ($11.66/month), Business ($12.50/month)

Read more:   10 Best Writing Apps To Make You A Better Writer!

5. Typeset.io

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
• Paid plans start from: Researcher ($8/month), Team($6/month), Journals / Publishers (contact sales)

6. Scrivener

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
• Paid plans start from $40.84/one-time fee

7. ProofHub

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
• 14-day free trial with all the features.

8. Google Scholar

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
• Free to use

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
• Paid plans start from $249

10. Evernote

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
• 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)

11. Mendeley

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
• Paid plans start from $55/year for 5 GB to $165/year to unlimited storage

12. ContentMine

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
• Contact sales

13. ResearchGate

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

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, y our 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.

Further reads:

• Top 11 Code Editors for Software Developers
• Collaborative Research: Definition, Benefits & Tips!
• Best Resource Management Tools and Software
• How to Write a Research Proposal?

11 Best Link in Bio Tools in 2024!

Vision Statements: Definitions, Examples, and Best Practices

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About Bit.ai

Bit.ai is the essential next-gen workplace and document collaboration platform. that helps teams share knowledge by connecting any type of digital content. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, anyone can work visually and collaborate in real-time while creating internal notes, team projects, knowledge bases, client-facing content, and more.

The smartest online Google Docs and Word alternative, Bit.ai is used in over 100 countries by professionals everywhere, from IT teams creating internal documentation and knowledge bases, to sales and marketing teams sharing client materials and client portals.

👉👉Click Here to Check out Bit.ai.

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The best AI tools for research papers and academic research (Literature review, grants, PDFs and more)

As our collective understanding and application of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, so too does the realm of academic research. Some people are scared by it while others are openly embracing the change. 

Make no mistake, AI is here to stay!

Instead of tirelessly scrolling through hundreds of PDFs, a powerful AI tool comes to your rescue, summarizing key information in your research papers. Instead of manually combing through citations and conducting literature reviews, an AI research assistant proficiently handles these tasks.

These aren’t futuristic dreams, but today’s reality. Welcome to the transformative world of AI-powered research tools!

This blog post will dive deeper into these tools, providing a detailed review of how AI is revolutionizing academic research. We’ll look at the tools that can make your literature review process less tedious, your search for relevant papers more precise, and your overall research process more efficient and fruitful.

I know that I wish these were around during my time in academia. It can be quite confronting when trying to work out what ones you should and shouldn’t use. A new one seems to be coming out every day!

Here is everything you need to know about AI for academic research and the ones I have personally trialed on my YouTube channel.

My Top AI Tools for Researchers and Academics – Tested and Reviewed!

There are many different tools now available on the market but there are only a handful that are specifically designed with researchers and academics as their primary user.

These are my recommendations that’ll cover almost everything that you’ll want to do:

Want to find out all of the tools that you could use?

Here they are, below:

AI literature search and mapping – best AI tools for a literature review – elicit and more

Harnessing AI tools for literature reviews and mapping brings a new level of efficiency and precision to academic research. No longer do you have to spend hours looking in obscure research databases to find what you need!

AI-powered tools like Semantic Scholar and elicit.org use sophisticated search engines to quickly identify relevant papers.

They can mine key information from countless PDFs, drastically reducing research time. You can even search with semantic questions, rather than having to deal with key words etc.

With AI as your research assistant, you can navigate the vast sea of scientific research with ease, uncovering citations and focusing on academic writing. It’s a revolutionary way to take on literature reviews.

• Elicit –  https://elicit.org
• Litmaps –  https://www.litmaps.com
• Research rabbit – https://www.researchrabbit.ai/
• Connected Papers –  https://www.connectedpapers.com/
• Supersymmetry.ai: https://www.supersymmetry.ai
• Semantic Scholar: https://www.semanticscholar.org
• Laser AI –  https://laser.ai/
• Inciteful –  https://inciteful.xyz/
• Scite –  https://scite.ai/
• System –  https://www.system.com

If you like AI tools you may want to check out this article:

• How to get ChatGPT to write an essay [The prompts you need]

AI-powered research tools and AI for academic research

AI research tools, like Concensus, offer immense benefits in scientific research. Here are the general AI-powered tools for academic research. 

These AI-powered tools can efficiently summarize PDFs, extract key information, and perform AI-powered searches, and much more. Some are even working towards adding your own data base of files to ask questions from. 

Tools like scite even analyze citations in depth, while AI models like ChatGPT elicit new perspectives.

The result? The research process, previously a grueling endeavor, becomes significantly streamlined, offering you time for deeper exploration and understanding. Say goodbye to traditional struggles, and hello to your new AI research assistant!

• Consensus –  https://consensus.app/
• Iris AI –  https://iris.ai/
• Research Buddy –  https://researchbuddy.app/
• Mirror Think – https://mirrorthink.ai

AI for reading peer-reviewed papers easily

Using AI tools like Explain paper and Humata can significantly enhance your engagement with peer-reviewed papers. I always used to skip over the details of the papers because I had reached saturation point with the information coming in. 

These AI-powered research tools provide succinct summaries, saving you from sifting through extensive PDFs – no more boring nights trying to figure out which papers are the most important ones for you to read!

They not only facilitate efficient literature reviews by presenting key information, but also find overlooked insights.

With AI, deciphering complex citations and accelerating research has never been easier.

• Aetherbrain – https://aetherbrain.ai
• Explain Paper – https://www.explainpaper.com
• Chat PDF – https://www.chatpdf.com
• Humata – https://www.humata.ai/
• Lateral AI –  https://www.lateral.io/
• Paper Brain –  https://www.paperbrain.study/
• Scholarcy – https://www.scholarcy.com/
• SciSpace Copilot –  https://typeset.io/
• Unriddle – https://www.unriddle.ai/
• Sharly.ai – https://www.sharly.ai/
• Open Read –  https://www.openread.academy

AI for scientific writing and research papers

In the ever-evolving realm of academic research, AI tools are increasingly taking center stage.

Enter Paper Wizard, Jenny.AI, and Wisio – these groundbreaking platforms are set to revolutionize the way we approach scientific writing.

Together, these AI tools are pioneering a new era of efficient, streamlined scientific writing.

• Jenny.AI – https://jenni.ai/ (20% off with code ANDY20)
• Yomu – https://www.yomu.ai
• Wisio – https://www.wisio.app

AI academic editing tools

In the realm of scientific writing and editing, artificial intelligence (AI) tools are making a world of difference, offering precision and efficiency like never before. Consider tools such as Paper Pal, Writefull, and Trinka.

Together, these tools usher in a new era of scientific writing, where AI is your dedicated partner in the quest for impeccable composition.

• PaperPal –  https://paperpal.com/
• Writefull –  https://www.writefull.com/
• Trinka –  https://www.trinka.ai/

AI tools for grant writing

In the challenging realm of science grant writing, two innovative AI tools are making waves: Granted AI and Grantable.

These platforms are game-changers, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to streamline and enhance the grant application process.

Granted AI, an intelligent tool, uses AI algorithms to simplify the process of finding, applying, and managing grants. Meanwhile, Grantable offers a platform that automates and organizes grant application processes, making it easier than ever to secure funding.

Together, these tools are transforming the way we approach grant writing, using the power of AI to turn a complex, often arduous task into a more manageable, efficient, and successful endeavor.

• Granted AI – https://grantedai.com/
• Grantable – https://grantable.co/

Best free AI research tools

There are many different tools online that are emerging for researchers to be able to streamline their research processes. There’s no need for convience to come at a massive cost and break the bank.

The best free ones at time of writing are:

• Elicit – https://elicit.org
• Connected Papers – https://www.connectedpapers.com/
• Litmaps – https://www.litmaps.com ( 10% off Pro subscription using the code “STAPLETON” )
• Consensus – https://consensus.app/

Wrapping up

The integration of artificial intelligence in the world of academic research is nothing short of revolutionary.

With the array of AI tools we’ve explored today – from research and mapping, literature review, peer-reviewed papers reading, scientific writing, to academic editing and grant writing – the landscape of research is significantly transformed.

The advantages that AI-powered research tools bring to the table – efficiency, precision, time saving, and a more streamlined process – cannot be overstated.

These AI research tools aren’t just about convenience; they are transforming the way we conduct and comprehend research.

They liberate researchers from the clutches of tedium and overwhelm, allowing for more space for deep exploration, innovative thinking, and in-depth comprehension.

Whether you’re an experienced academic researcher or a student just starting out, these tools provide indispensable aid in your research journey.

And with a suite of free AI tools also available, there is no reason to not explore and embrace this AI revolution in academic research.

We are on the precipice of a new era of academic research, one where AI and human ingenuity work in tandem for richer, more profound scientific exploration. The future of research is here, and it is smart, efficient, and AI-powered.

Before we get too excited however, let us remember that AI tools are meant to be our assistants, not our masters. As we engage with these advanced technologies, let’s not lose sight of the human intellect, intuition, and imagination that form the heart of all meaningful research. Happy researching!

Thank you to Ivan Aguilar – Ph.D. Student at SFU (Simon Fraser University), for starting this list for me!

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

Thank you for visiting Academia Insider.

We are here to help you navigate Academia as painlessly as possible. We are supported by our readers and by visiting you are helping us earn a small amount through ads and affiliate revenue - Thank you!

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Your Writing Assistant for Research

Unlock Your Research Potential with Jenni AI

Are you an academic researcher seeking assistance in your quest to create remarkable research and scientific papers? Jenni AI is here to empower you, not by doing the work for you, but by enhancing your research process and efficiency. Explore how Jenni AI can elevate your academic writing experience and accelerate your journey toward academic excellence.

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Save time and effort with AI assistance, allowing you to focus on critical aspects of your research. Craft well-structured, scholarly papers with ease, backed by AI-driven recommendations and real-time feedback.

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Overcome Writer's Block

Get inspiration and generate ideas to break through the barriers of writer's block. Jenni AI generates research prompts tailored to your subject, sparking your creativity and guiding your research.

Unlock Your Full Writing Potential

Jenni AI is designed to boost your academic writing capabilities, not as a shortcut, but as a tool to help you overcome writer's block and enhance your research papers' quality.

 Ensure Accuracy

Properly format citations and references, ensuring your work meets academic standards. Jenni AI offers accurate and hassle-free citation assistance, including APA, MLA, and Chicago styles.

Our Commitment: Academic Honesty

Jenni AI is committed to upholding academic integrity. Our tool is designed to assist, not replace, your effort in research and writing. We strongly discourage any unethical use. We're dedicated to helping you excel in a responsible and ethical manner.

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To get started, sign up for a free account on Jenni AI's platform.

Prompt Generation

Input your research topic, and Jenni AI generates comprehensive prompts to kickstart your paper.

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Find credible sources, articles, and relevant data with ease through our powerful AI-driven research assistant.

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Draft and refine your paper with real-time suggestions for structure, content, and clarity.

Citation & References

Let Jenni AI handle your citations and references in multiple styles, saving you valuable time.

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Discover how Jenni AI has made a difference in the lives of academics just like you

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Love this use of AI to assist with, not replace, writing! Keep crushing it @Davidjpark96 💪

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Frequently asked questions

How much does jenni ai cost, how can jenni ai assist me in writing complex academic papers, can jenni ai handle different types of academic papers, such as essays, research papers, and dissertationss jenni ai maintain the originality of my work, how does artificial intelligence enhance my academic writing with jenni ai.

Can Jenni AI help me structure and write a comprehensive literature review?

Will using Jenni AI improve my overall writing skills?

Can Jenni AI assist with crafting a thesis statement?

What sets Jenni AI apart as an AI-powered writing tool?

Can I trust Jenni AI to help me maintain academic integrity in my work?

Choosing the Right Academic Writing Companion

Get ready to make an informed decision and uncover the key reasons why Jenni AI is your ultimate tool for academic excellence.

Feature Featire

COMPETITORS

Enhanced Writing Style

Jenni AI excels in refining your writing style and enhancing sentence structure to meet academic standards with precision.

Competitors may offer basic grammar checking but often fall short in fine-tuning the nuances of writing style.

Academic Writing Process

Jenni AI streamlines the academic writing process, offering real-time assistance in content generation and thorough proofreading.

Competitors may not provide the same level of support, leaving users to navigate the intricacies of academic writing on their own.

Scientific Writing

Jenni AI is tailored for scientific writing, ensuring the clarity and precision needed in research articles and reports.

Competitors may offer generic writing tools that lack the specialized features required for scientific writing.

Original Content and Academic Integrity

Jenni AI's AI algorithms focus on producing original content while preventing plagiarism, ensuring academic integrity.

Competitors may not provide robust plagiarism checks, potentially compromising academic integrity.

Valuable Tool for Technical Writing

Jenni AI extends its versatility to technical writing, aiding in the creation of clear and concise technical documents.

Some competitors may not be as well-suited for technical writing projects.

User-Friendly Interface

Jenni AI offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easy for both novice and experienced writers to utilize its features effectively.

Some competitors may have steeper learning curves or complex interfaces, which can be time-consuming and frustrating for users.

Seamless Citation Management

Jenni AI simplifies the citation management process, offering suggestions and templates for various citation styles.

Competitors may not provide the same level of support for correct and consistent citations.

Ready to Revolutionize Your Research Writing?

Sign up for a free Jenni AI account today. Unlock your research potential and experience the difference for yourself. Your journey to academic excellence starts here.

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Academic Research Tools: What they are + Top 5 Best

Academic research is a rigorous activity that requires a lot of dedication and diligence to provide great-quality results. Technology has improved how we access information by making access to information faster and more effective, so we carry out research more efficiently. 

When conducting research, you must have the best methods and tools to facilitate the process. Every researcher needs a typing assistant to review spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes. If your research involves data analysis, you need a statistical research tool. You’ll probably need a virtual library for consulting if it involves psychology or sociology.

What are academic research tools?

An academic research tool is a software or platform that helps researchers organize, analyze, and manage the various components of their research projects. Some examples of academic research tools include reference management software, data visualization software, and survey design tools. These tools are designed to support the various stages of the research process, from literature review and data collection to data analysis and publication.

Reference management software, such as Mendeley or Endnote, allows researchers to organize and manage their bibliographic references and citations. This can be particularly helpful for large literature reviews, as it allows researchers to easily search and access their reference library and format citations and bibliographies in various styles. Additionally, many reference management tools offer features like annotation and collaboration, so researchers can share their reference libraries with colleagues and work on them together.

Data visualization software, like Tableau or R, can help researchers to explore and understand their data. These tools allow researchers to create interactive visualizations from their data, such as charts, graphs, and maps. This can be very useful for identifying patterns and trends that might not be immediately apparent from looking at raw data. These tools also provide a way to communicate the findings from their research clearly and effectively, as visualizations can be more easily understood than raw data.

Data collection software is another important tool that can support the research process. This software can be used to design and administer surveys, collect and store data, and manage participant information. Top data collection software such as QuestionPro offers a variety of question types, such as multiple choice, rating scales, and open-ended questions. They can be used to conduct surveys online or in person. This software also provides features like skip logic, data validation, and data export, which can help to ensure data quality and facilitate analysis. Some data collection software also integrates with data visualization or statistical software, making it easy to analyze and visualize once data is collected.

Top 5 Academic Research Tools

There are endless tools for academic research that can help you in any stage of the research process, from educational search engine software and project management tools to grammar editors and reference managers. Adopting these technologies can improve the quality of academic research, regardless of the field or topic. 

From the multiple options in the market, we made a list of the best five academic research tools you can use to level up your academic research:

EndNote gives you the tools you need for searching, organizing, and sharing your research. It allows you to easily create bibliographies while writing your following paper with features like Cite While You Write. Maximize your time with features like finding full text for your references and automatically updating records.

Whether you’re on your desktop, online, or iPad, EndNote’s syncing capabilities let you access all of your references, attachments, and groups from anywhere.

Bit AI is an excellent tool for collaborating on research with your team. It’s essentially like a Google Docs but specifically made for research. You can upload and share different file formats, including PDFs, videos, white papers, etc., and then edit them together with your team.

Typeset is a great tool when it comes to writing your own research papers. You can upload all your references for simple citations and check your work for spelling errors and plagiarism. Typeset also offers features to collaborate with your teammates and get the work done together.

2. Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a classic tool that only some people know about. It’s essentially a version of the traditional Google search but focused on scientific and academic papers, journals, books, and other publications. Instead of using Google, you can use Google Scholar to eliminate the risk of citing non-credible sources.

1. QuestionPro

Most academic research, regardless of field or topic, requires data analysis so the information can have a solid foundation. Online surveys are critical to examine population samples so hypotheses can be proved or disregarded. While methods and techniques may vary, QuestionPro survey software is an excellent academic research tool for conducting online surveys.

QuestionPro’s robust suite of research tools provides you with all you need to derive research results. If someone needs a simple survey tool or a collaborative research solution, this software offers solutions in an intuitive way. The platform is simple to use intuitively, but our certification process can assist you in creating powerful surveys that minimize the risks of information bias. If needed, in the platform, you can also perform Audience Surveys . Audience gives you access to millions of possible respondents so that your segmentation sample for academic research becomes 360°.

QuestionPro also provides easy-to-setup analytical research tools to build dashboards and visualizations for all your research results. Presenting the data collected comprehensively is a crucial factor in research, making it easier for anyone to consult and cite the information.

It’s crucial to decide on the tools for data collection because research is carried out in different ways and for various purposes. Data collection aims to capture quality evidence that allows analysis to formulate convincing and credible answers to the posed questions.

With QuestionPro Education Research Solutions, you gain access to the top survey software in the market. Conduct powerful surveys with a complete set of data analytics tools to gather valuable insights. Join our community of more than 5000+ universities and colleges across the globe that already use our platform to make research of impact.

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8 useful research paper writing tools and resources

Academic writing can be a daunting and time-consuming process, but with the help of the right tools you can make writing your paper much easier.

In this post, we have pulled together 8 tools and resources that will help you work better and smarter when writing a research paper.

Our downloadable comprehensive free guide: Writing your paper

Todoist: A to-do list to organize your work

Evernote: As a research notebook

Grammarly: Cloud based typing assistant

Ref-n-Write: Look up and learn while writing your paper

Hemingway Editor: Refine your work to be bold and clear

Our downloadable article and journal templates

Our 10-point checklist to guide your writing process

Writing your paper: a comprehensive free guide

If you’re ready to start writing your paper, our Writing your paper free guide is a useful tool to help you through your various writing stages.

This resource will guide you through writing your paper from start to finish, including preparation and setting your structure, to writing every section of your paper and preparing it for submission.

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Related posts, insights topics.

Read the guide to find out all you need to know about:

Article structures and formatting

Choosing keywords and writing for SEO

How to write your research manuscript

Refining your writing

Finalizing the details of your paper

Considering ethics

Download your free guide today  for guidance on how to navigate the article writing process.

Todoist is a task management app that can help you stay organized during the writing process.

Writing an academic paper is not just about putting the words on paper. In fact, some researchers might argue the writing is one of the easier parts! Your tasks before you start writing are also critical to your writing success.

If you’ve read our Writing your paper free guide , you’ll know that it’s important to prepare before you start writing. You need to organize your thoughts, materials, and the steps you plan to take to prepare your article for submission . This is where Todoist comes in.

Todoist can be used for planning, scheduling, and building the outline for your personal, work, and academic tasks. Part of its appeal is its simple functionality and portability.

It can be used on your phone, tablet, and computer with great collaboration and integration capabilities. This could be like having your personal assistant with you at all times.

Todoist is free to use, but for higher project limits or additional features like reminders, you can decide if you need an upgraded paid version.

An example of a simple outline:

If you’re looking for a productive way to take notes and sort through your research materials, Evernote can be a useful tool to consider.

You can organize your research by creating a notebook structure to keep similar notes together. You can also make your notes more useful by adding texts, images, and documents.

Another useful feature is capturing audio notes with the inbuilt recorder. It’s easy to share and discuss your notes and notebooks, without having to leave the Evernote app.

Keep in mind you can also seamlessly create Todoist tasks from Evernote notes, and vice versa to double your productivity.

The basic version of Evernote is free and lets you create unlimited notes but with a limitation of storage space to 60MB a month. For more storage you will require to upgrade to a paid subscription plan.

Here’s what it might look like to get started:

Grammarly is a typing assistant that uses artificial intelligence to identify any errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, then suggests an appropriate replacement.

When you install it on your laptop or computer, it will flag any errors in your text and provide you with an alternative, or even prompt you to remove particular phrases.

Keep in mind that your paper might contain technical terms or phrases that Grammarly may not understand, which could be flagged as errors. So, make sure you look over the prompts from Grammarly before accepting changes.

The basic function of Grammarly is free, which helps identify most spelling and grammar errors, but for a more robust check on everything you write, a paid upgraded premium version is available.

Also, you could consider using a professional academic editor , who will make sure your manuscript meets scholarly English standards.

Ref-n-Write

High-quality research deserves proper academic writing.  Ref-n-Write  is a tool with an impressive library of phrases used in academic writing. Using artificial intelligence technology, the tool provides details on choosing the right academic phrase, cross-referencing previous work, suggesting new ideas, and more.

Non-native English speakers may find this tool helpful to paraphrase their text and improve their English writing skills through practice. To test out the referencing, paraphrasing and phrase bank tools, you can sign up for a free trial.

Don’t allow language be an issue in getting your research published. Please read this guide for more information on  how to break language barriers and publish in international journals .

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is an editing tool that can help you refine your writing, pinpointing areas of your work that will affect readability. Clear writing is important to communicate your research effectively to readers.

This tool also guides you on how to improve the sentences in your document. It highlights sentences that are hard to read, words or phrases with simpler alternatives, passive voices, as well as the number of adverbs present in your work.

Hemingway App has a free version but it also has a paid version with additional features for publishing, formatting and more .

For confidence about the quality of your paper, also consider the extra step of using experts in subject-relevant editing . They will make sure your work is free of grammatical, spelling, and other common language errors.

Article and journal templates

To save you time, our downloadable article and journal templates are a useful resource for formatting your manuscript. Our template will help you format your work correctly for submission, and make sure you have the information the target journal expects to see.

Make sure you download the relevant template and apply it to your research paper, following the instructions provided.

Remember to follow the instructions regarding your specific research article’s format. Here’s a guide on the variety of different types of research articles .

You can also focus on your research and save valuable time by letting experts in academic formatting look after the format of your manuscript.

Writing your paper checklist

This checklist is a useful resource to help you quickly review all you need to write an effective paper.

Whether you are writing a paper for an assignment or to submit to a journal, this list contains important information on  what makes a good research paper .

Follow the steps in our 10-point checklist, to help guide how you plan and organize your research to write an impactful paper.

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Get a head start in your paper writing with this free guide.

You will have a blueprint to help you produce an impactful research paper.

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Maximize your research potential: Top 20 research tools you need to know

In today’s digital age, with a plethora of tools available at our fingertips, researchers can now collect and analyze data with greater ease and efficiency. These research tools not only save time but also provide more accurate and reliable results. In this blog post, we will explore some of the essential research tools that every researcher should have in their toolkit.

From data collection to data analysis and presentation, this blog will cover it all. So, if you’re a researcher looking to streamline your work and improve your results, keep reading to discover the must-have tools for research success.

Revolutionize your research: The top 20 must-have research tools

Research requires various tools to collect, analyze and disseminate information effectively. Some essential research tools include search engines like Google Scholar, JSTOR, and PubMed, reference management software like Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote, statistical analysis tools like SPSS, R, and Stata, writing tools like Microsoft Word and Grammarly, and data visualization tools like Tableau and Excel.  

1. Google Scholar –  Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly literature, including articles, theses, books, and conference papers.

2. JSTOR –  JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

3.PubMed – PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics.  

4. Web of Science : Web of Science is a citation index that allows you to search for articles, conference proceedings, and books across various scientific disciplines.  

5. Scopus – Scopus citation database that covers scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences literature.  

6. Zotero: Zotero is a free, open-source citation management tool that helps you organize your research sources, create bibliographies, and collaborate with others.

7. Mendeley – Mendeley is a reference management software that allows you to organize and share your research papers and collaborate with others.

8. EndNote – EndNoted is a  software tool for managing bibliographies, citations, and references on the Windows and macOS operating systems.  

9. RefWorks – RefWorks is a  web-based reference management tool that allows you to create and organize a personal database of references and generate citations and bibliographies.

10. Evernote –   Evernote is a digital notebook that allows you to capture and organize your research notes, web clippings, and documents.

11. SPSS – SPSS is a statistical software package used for data analysis, data mining, and forecasting.

12. R – R is a free, open-source software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

13. Stata – Stata is a  statistical software package that provides a suite of applications for data management and statistical analysis.

Other helpful tools for collaboration and organization include NVivo, Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. With these tools, researchers can effectively find relevant literature, manage references, analyze data, write research papers, create visual representations of data, and collaborate with peers.  

14. Excel –   Excel is spreadsheet software used for organizing, analyzing, and presenting data.

15. Tableau – Tableau is a data visualization software that allows you to create interactive visualizations and dashboards.

16. NVivo – Nviva is a software tool for qualitative research and data analysis.

17. Slack – Slack is a messaging platform for team communication and collaboration.

18. Zoom –   Zoom is a video conferencing software that allows you to conduct virtual meetings and webinars.

19. Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform that allows you to chat, share files, and collaborate with your team.

20. Qualtrics – Qualtrics is an online survey platform that allows researchers to design and distribute surveys, collect and analyze data, and generate reports.

Maximizing accuracy and efficiency with research tools

Research is a vital aspect of any academic discipline, and it is critical to have access to appropriate research tools to facilitate the research process. Researchers require access to various research tools and software to conduct research, analyze data, and report research findings. Some standard research tools researchers use include search engines, reference management software, statistical analysis tools, writing tools, and data visualization tools.

Specialized research tools are also available for researchers in specific fields, such as GIS software for geographers and geneticist gene sequence analysis tools. These tools help researchers organize data, collaborate with peers, and effectively present research findings.

It is crucial for researchers to choose the right tools for their research project, as these tools can significantly impact the accuracy and reliability of research findings.

Summing it up, researchers today have access to an array of essential research tools that can help simplify the research process. From data collection to analysis and presentation, these tools make research more accessible, efficient, and accurate. By leveraging these tools, researchers can improve their work and produce more high-quality research.

Written by Prasad D Wilagama

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Top 15 Academic Research Tools For Scholars And Tutors

Using specialised tools has become more important in the ever changing field of academic research. These tools reference management, data visualisation, survey design, literature search, writing, and editing, are essential for improving the efficiency of the research process and the quality of scholarly output. Researchers can smoothly collect, assess, and share data using the top 15 academic research tools we are sharing, which will ultimately change the way research is carried out and done.

 We will examine the essential resources for successful research in this guide, offering insightful analyses of the top three resources in each category—all discussed in simple language for a general audience. So let us start this discussing the ultimate top 3 for all the categories we have today.

Top 3 Academic Research Tools For Reference Management

Table of Contents

Reference management tools, also known as citation managers, are programs or online services that help researchers collect, organise, and cite references. These tools offer features such as storing references in a searchable database, attaching PDFs and other files, and auto-generating citations and bibliographies in the preferred citation style. They also allow users to share collections of references with others and sync references across multiple devices. Some popular reference management tools include EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, and RefWorks.

Zotero is a free, open-source research management program that has been a game-changer for many researchers, including myself. Here are some benefits of using Zotero in academic research, drawn from personal experience:

• Time-saving : Zotero’s web browser plugins make it easy to save item information from the web, eliminating the need to manually copy and paste citations. It saves time and effort, especially while dealing with multiple sources.
• Automatic PDF downloading : Zotero is good at capturing and downloading full-text PDFs from databases, which can be particularly useful when working with limited access to certain resources.
• Built-in tools : Zotero has a built-in tool to extract source information from PDFs, making it easier to manage and organise your research materials.
• Citation style flexibility : Zotero supports virtually all citation styles, allowing you to format your citations consistently and according to your institution’s guidelines.
• Word processor integration : Zotero’s word processor plugins let you “cite as you write,” making it easier to insert citations directly into your paper without having to switch between different applications .

EndNote is a popular citation management tool used by researchers, faculty, and students to store, organise, and cite references. Here are some benefits of using EndNote in academic research:

• Organisation: EndNote allows you to organise your research materials by creating folders, adding notes, and tagging citations, making it easier to locate and manage your sources.
• Better Time Management: By using EndNote, you can manage your research more efficiently, making it easier to meet deadlines and stay organised throughout the research process.
• Full-text PDF downloading: EndNote enables you to automatically attach and download full-text PDFs to saved references, making it easier to read, review, and annotate articles without having to switch between different applications.
• Collaboration: EndNote allows you to share your research with others, facilitating collaboration on research projects and group assignments.
• Bibliography: When it comes time to create a bibliography, EndNote sprinkles some magic. It seamlessly integrates with Word, turning your list of references from a headache-inducing task into a point-and-click breeze.

For researchers and journal editors among all the reference management tools Mendley is very popular. Other than its feature of ease of use here are few other features of it:

• Free of Cost: Best of all, Mendeley doesn’t cost anything. It’s free and all of us love these free tools as they are budget friendly and do not cost anything. Library Superpower: Mendeley is like a superhero library for your computer. It keeps all your research papers and articles in one organised place.
• Teamwork Friendly: If you’re working on a project with friends, Mendeley makes it easy to share your library. Teamwork just got a whole lot simpler.
• Highlight and Scribble: If you find something cool in a paper, you can highlight it and write notes on your computer. It’s like doodling on your homework but way more useful.
• Discover New Things: Mendeley even helps you discover new articles based on what you like. It’s like a friend suggesting cool stuff to read.

Top 3 Academic Research Tools For Data Visualisation And Analysis

Data visualisation and analysis tools are software or online platforms that help users create visual representations of data, making it easier to understand and interpret complex information. These tools enable users to generate various types of visualisations, such as charts, graphs, and maps, from their data sets. By presenting data visually, these tools facilitate quicker and more effective decision-making, allowing users to examine trends and information that is not immediately apparent from the raw data. Also it offers features for customising and sharing visualisations, making them valuable for both individual analysis and collaborative work. Some of the popular tools are as:

In academic research, Tableau is a data visualisation and analysis application that is becoming more and more popular. Using Tableau in academic research has several advantages, which I have personally experienced:

• Easy to use: Tableau is simple to use and intuitive to understand, making it available to researchers of all experience levels.
• Data visualisation: Tableau makes complex data easier to understand and analyse by enabling you to build dynamic, eye-catching charts, graphs, and maps.
• Integration with different data sources: Tableau facilitates the work with a variety of data types by helping you to access a vast range of data sources.
• Real-time data analysis : With Tableau’s ability to analyse data in real-time, you can act quickly and decisively based on up-to-date knowledge.
• R (Programming Language)

R is a programming language and software database used for statistical computing and graphics. It’s like a super-smart tool for crunching numbers, making cool charts, and handling data in a way that even non-computer wizards can understand. Following are some of the features of it:

• Flexibility and Extensibility : R’s flexible nature allows researchers to create custom functions, tailor analyses to specific needs, and interface with other programming languages like C, Python, and Java, enhancing its extensibility.
• Community Support: The R community is basically my online superhero squad. Whenever I got stuck on some coding conundrum, forums and groups were there with advice and solutions. It’s like having a 24/7 coding help hotline.
• Advanced Visualisations and Quick Implementation : R offers advanced visualisations and allows for the quick implementation of new theoretical approaches, which can be highly beneficial for researchers working with complex data.
• Continuous Evolution: R is always evolving. New packages, updates, and features keep popping up. It’s like your favourite app that keeps getting better with each update.
• Cost-Free Awesomeness: R doesn’t cost a cent. In a world where software can drain your wallet, R is the ultimate budget-friendly genius. It’s like getting a high-end software package without the hefty price tag.
• Python (Having Libraries Like Matplotlib And Seaborn)

Python is an adaptable and user-friendly programming language. It’s like a friendly guide for beginners, helping them write code effortlessly. With a vast library ecosystem, Python is a go-to language for tasks ranging from simple scripts to complex machine learning projects. Here is a short list of features of Python:

• Coding Zen: Python is like the cool kid in coding class. It’s easy to learn, which is a big relief when you’re juggling research and a gazillion other things.
• Open-Source and Cost-Effective : Python is open-source, platform-independent, and does not require fees or licences, making it a low-risk and cost-effective option for academic research.
• Versatile Toolbox: Python has a toolbox full of libraries. If we need to do something specific there’s probably a library for it. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife for data tasks.
• Machine Learning Marvel: Python is the superhero of machine learning. With libraries like TensorFlow and scikit-learn, it’s like having Iron Man’s suit for training models and making predictions.
• Data Analysis Capabilities : Python offers a large range of statistical tests, models, and capabilities, and it is mainly opted for machine learning and data analysis.

Top 3 Academic Research Tools For Survey Design And Data Collection

Survey design and data collection tools are software or online platforms that help researchers gather information from a specific group of people about their views, interests, or understandings. These tools offer various methods for creating surveys, such as questionnaires, e-surveys, telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, focus groups, and electronic (e-mail or website) surveys. These tools offer features like customizable templates, question types, and data analysis capabilities, making them essential for conducting effective surveys and collecting valuable data for research purposes. Top 3 survey design and data collections tools are as:

Qualtrics is an online survey platform that helps you create and analyse surveys. It’s like a digital survey wizard, making it easy to collect and understand data. With user-friendly features, Qualtrics simplifies the survey process for everyone.

• Super Easy Surveys: Qualtrics turns survey-making into a piece of cake. You drag, drop, and boom – your survey is ready. No need for a PhD in tech.
• Data Heaven: When the replies start coming in, Qualtrics is a data wizard. It handles calculations and organisation like an expert. No more getting lost in a pile of info.
• Real-Time Feedback : Qualtrics allows researchers to listen to real-time feedback from students, faculty, and staff, making it easier to understand and improve the educational experience
• Student Budget Friendly: Qualtrics won’t cost you a lot. It’s like getting a premium   survey experience without losing some weight of your wallet. 
• Surveymonkey

SurveyMonkey is an online platform that creates and analyses surveys. It’s like having a survey guru in your pocket, simplifying the process with a user-friendly interface and tools for gathering insights. Some of the main features are as:

• User Friendly: SurveyMonkey takes the headache out of making surveys. It’s so user-friendly that even a middle school child could create a survey without asking for tech support.
• Mobile Friendly: In a world glued to phones, SurveyMonkey is mobile-friendly. Respondents can tap away on any device, making my surveys accessible and cool.
• Confidentiality: SurveyMonkey provides high-security features and ensures that it is in the right hands and there is no breach of security. SurveyMonkey is like the superhero security guard, ensuring your data stays locked and safe.
• Feedback Buffet: SurveyMonkey isn’t just for surveys; it’s a feedback buffet. From opinions to reviews, it gathers feedback like a pro, turning me into a feedback platter.
• Data Playground: SurveyMonkey transforms data into a playground once the responses start rolling in. Spreadsheet making is a thing of the past; insights are the rollercoaster of a data carnival.
• Redcap (Research Electronic Data Capture)

REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a user-friendly, secure, and web-based application for data collection and management in research. It’s like having a digital assistant that simplifies the process of gathering and organising research data efficiently and safely. Some of the attractive features of Redcap are as:

• User-Friendly Interface : REDCap offers a user-friendly web-based interface that puts researchers in total control of their work, allowing them to manage their own projects whenever and however they wish, through any browser on any device.
• Cost-Effective : REDCap is a cost-effective choice for academic research because it is a free, safe, web-based application that allows data capture for research studies.
• Wide Range of Forms: REDCap offers a versatile solution for creating surveys, whether they are straightforward or intricate. It’s akin to having a variety of forms at your disposal, allowing you to select and customise according to your specific needs, just like choosing items from a buffet.
• Customizable Surveys : REDCap allows researchers to customise their surveys to meet their local security policies and personalise features/functionality to address user needs.
• Secure Data Collection : REDCap provides a secure data collection tool that meets HIPAA compliance standards, making it a reliable and safe option for data collection.

Top 3 Academic Research Tools For Literature Search

Literature search tools are software or online platforms that help researchers find, organise, and analyse relevant information via different sources, such as educational articles, books, and other journals. These tools offer features like search engines for research papers, literature review software based on citation networks, tools for locating open access scientific papers, and more. Some of the best literature search tools are as:

PubMed is a free, easy-to-use search engine that lets you find and read articles on life sciences and biomedical topics. It has more than 35 million citations and abstracts, with links to full-text articles when available. It is managed by the National Library of Medicine and is a reliable source for researchers and students. Some of its main features are as:

• Free Access : PubMed is freely accessible, making it a cost-effective option for academic research.PubMed is like a scholarship for information, supporting my academic journey without draining my student budget. 
• Abstract Summaries: Reading full articles can be time-consuming, but PubMed spoils me with abstracts. It’s like having a trailer before committing to the whole movie – efficient and smart.
• Historical Journey: PubMed is a time machine for research. It’s like flipping through the pages of history, seeing how studies evolved over time. Each article tells a story.
• Integration with Other Sources : PubMed can integrate data from other sources, making it easier to analyse and interpret data ensuring that different data sets will react collectively.
• Ease of Use : PubMed offers a user-friendly interface that allows researchers to search for articles using keywords or Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), making it easy to find relevant information.
• Google Scholar

Users can locate academic resources and scholarly literature, such as books, articles, theses, abstracts, and court opinions, using the free Google Scholar search engine. It searches many different sources, such as websites from universities, professional associations, academic publishers, and online repositories. Google Scholar attempts to organise papers according to researcher rankings. Some of its main features are as:

• No Membership Fee: Best of all, it’s free. Google Scholar is like a gift that keeps on giving, supporting my academic journey. It is freely accessible, making it a cost-effective option for academic research.
• Diverse Resource Hub: It’s not just articles; Google Scholar is a hub of diverse resources. It’s like a buffet of knowledge, offering books, theses, and conference papers on my research plate.
• Advanced Search Capabilities : Google Scholar offers advanced search capabilities, including filters and limiters, allowing researchers to refine their search results.
• My Virtual Bookshelf: Google Scholar is my digital bookshelf. It’s like having a tidy shelf where I can collect and revisit my favourite studies. No more going through piles of papers.

Scopus allows users to search both forward and backward in time for scientific, technical, and medical journal articles and the references included in those articles. Authors, researchers, students, librarians, universities, and others use the database to find, locate, and evaluate research output from around the world. Some of its main features are as: 

• Global Coverage : Scopus covers journals from multiple disciplines, like science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities, offering a broad spectrum of research fields and topics.
• Keyword Treasure Hunt: Searching Scopus for particular keywords is similar to going on a scavenger hunt. Similar to looking for hidden treasures, each keyword reveals a wealth of useful information.
• Graphical Journey: Visualizing research connections is like a graphical journey on Scopus. It’s like having a map that shows the academic world’s complex web of ideas and influences.
• Academic Evaluation : Scopus Indexed Journals are often considered in academic evaluation processes, such as tenure and promotion decisions, as a measure of a researcher’s scholarly output and impact.

Top 3 Academic Research Tools For Writing And Editing

Writing and editing tools are software applications that help writers and content creators improve the quality of their work. It offers different features such as grammar and spell-check, style and readability analysis, and plagiarism detection. It can also help you with real-time feedback and suggestions to increase the overall quality of the content. Writing and editing tools are widely used to streamline the writing process, ensure accuracy, and maintain high standards of professionalism in written work. Some popular examples of these tools include Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and Latex

LaTeX is a document generation system with high-quality and it is commonly used for technical and scientific documents. It is free software and is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License. LaTeX is not a word processor; instead, it encourages authors to focus on the content of their documents, leaving the typesetting to the system. Some of its main highlights are as:

• Elegant Formatting: LaTeX produces high-quality typesetting, making documents look professional and polished. LaTeX is the fashion designer of documents. It’s like dressing up your research in a sleek suit, making it look elegant and professional .
• Mathematical Expertise: If you are Dealing with equations then LaTeX is like a maths wizard. It weaves equations into your text seamlessly, so your formulas look as good as your arguments.
• Easy Management of References and Citations : LaTeX allows researchers to label any piece of information they would like to use later for citations or as a reference, only requiring them to remember the label, and LaTeX handles everything.
• Portable and Platform-Independent : LaTeX files can be opened and altered with any text editor, and its formatting is consistent and automatically employed once set.
• Hemingway Editor

The Hemingway Editor is a user-friendly online tool that helps improve writing by highlighting and correcting common errors. It focuses on enhancing readability by identifying and simplifying complex sentences, passive voice , and adverbs. The tool offers both writing and editing modes, making it easy to create and refine content. Some of its main features are as:

• Simple & Powerful: In the world of writing tools, Hemingway Editor is simple yet powerful. It’s like the minimalist ninja, cutting through complexity and leaving my research polished and potent.
• Active Voice Enthusiast: Hemingway Editor is an active voice cheerleader. It’s like a coach nudging me to ditch passive constructions, making my writing punchier and more engaging.
• Readability Whisperer: Ensuring readability is Hemingway Editor’s secret weapon. It’s like having a readability whisperer, making sure my research doesn’t sound like an ancient manuscript but flows effortlessly.
• Formatting Friend: Hemingway Editor is also a formatting friend. It’s like a design consultant, making sure my text isn’t just clear but visually inviting, making my research a pleasure to read.

Grammarly is a digital writing tool that acts like a friendly grammar coach. It’s your online proofreader, catching typos, suggesting better words, and ensuring your sentences are clear and error-free. It helps you in making sure that there is no plagiarism in your content. Some its key highlights are as:

• Error Detective: Grammarly is my error detective. It spots typos, punctuation crimes, and grammatical slip-ups like detectives, saving me from embarrassing blunders.
• Plagiarism Protector: If you are worried about your accidental plagiarism then Grammarly is my protector. It’s like a shield, scanning my text to ensure it’s authentically mine and saving me from citation threats.
• Customizable Settings : Grammarly offers customizable settings, allowing researchers to adjust the tool according to their objectives and preferences like type of audience, knowledge level and other.
• Improving Writing Skills : Grammarly helps improve writing skills by providing suggestions and explanations for errors, helping researchers learn from their mistakes.

In conclusion, the top 15 academic research tools offer valuable support for various aspects of the research process. For reference management, tools like Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote provide efficient organisation and citation capabilities.

 In the realm of data visualisation and analysis, Tableau, Power BI, and Google Data Studio offer powerful solutions for interpreting and presenting research findings. Survey design and data collection are facilitated by Qualtrics, REDCap, and SurveyMonkey, which streamline the process of gathering and analysing data. 

When it comes to literature search, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus stand out as comprehensive and reliable resources for accessing scholarly literature. Finally, for writing and editing, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and LaTex offer indispensable support in enhancing the quality, clarity, and professionalism of academic writing. These tools collectively contribute to the efficiency, accuracy, and impact of academic research endeavours.

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Best AI Tools for Research Paper Writing in 2024

Table of Contents

Before discussing the unique benefits and characteristics of using AI tools in research, let’s look at some of the AI writing tools that can help you with writing a research paper. There’s a plethora of AI research tools available today tailored to different research purposes and with different capabilities. Let’s look at the 5 best AI tools for research that you can incorporate into your research and writing process.

Top 5 AI Tools for Research Paper Writing

• SciSpace Literature Review
• ChatGPT | Custom GPTs for Research Writing

Let's explore these tools in detail!

1 . SciSpace Literature Review

SciSpace’s Literature Review tool is designed for researchers to conduct systematic literature reviews efficiently. This AI research ChatPDF tool helps you compare and contrast scientific papers, and extract key information, themes, patterns, and concepts of numerous research papers in minutes, all in one single workspace.

By simply entering your questions or keywords or niche-specific topics, you can find relevant research articles from SciSpace’s repository of 282M+ scientific papers. With the matrix feature, you can filter and derive useful insights from relevant research papers and save time. You can extract the summaries of all the prominent sections of the research paper including introduction, abstract, methodologies, conclusions, discussions, etc. And ask follow-up questions simultaneously to ChatPDF , the AI research assistant, to identify gaps in the literature, and even extract empirical data from papers. This lets you dive deeper into each paper and get more clarity on concepts or ideas within them. With an AI research tool like SciSpace Literature Review, researchers can save hours of valuable time and boost the overall quality and productivity of their research while improving academic writing.

Here’s a sample:

2. ChatGPT | Custom GPTs for Research Writing

ChatGPT serves as a valuable ally for brainstorming research paper outlines and structures . Researchers can leverage ChatGPT to generate ideas, refine research questions , and outline the paper's framework. Custom GPTs that are tailored to research paper writing can also be very helpful.

Especially, custom GPTs for research writing like SciSpace’s GPT (formerly ResearchGPT) that are trained on scientific papers can help you locate relevant literature with ease and also brainstorm ideas for your research paper.

Explore SciSpace ChatPDF to read and interact with your long-form PDFs.

An example of a simple outline:

3. WordVice

WordVice enhances language precision, ensuring the clarity and coherence of research papers. It offers advanced proofreading, language enhancement, and coherence improvement.

By automatically detecting and correcting errors in academic papers with WordVice, researchers can let their words flow without the typical interruptions to make amends. It can also give coherent explanations of each error and suggest stylistic changes in your writing.

This AI writing tool is incredibly helpful in writing your research paper, especially if you’re not a native speaker of the language or if you don’t have enough grasp of grammar and the conventional usages in academic writing.

Take a look at this example:

4. Wordtune

A personal AI writing assistant that excels in paraphrasing, aiding researchers in presenting ideas with clarity and originality. It helps to rephrase and refine sentences, avoiding plagiarism and enhancing the overall quality of writing.

Do you want to sound more authentic in your writing and also find the appropriate words for different contexts? Wordtune can help you fine-tune any text and also improve the quality of writing by suggesting a plethora of options with the Spices feature. Spices feature is essentially meant to improve your writing by generating text and giving you different options to choose from.

This AI writing tool also includes the option to ‘Incorporate data from verified sources’ to make your paper more empirically adequate and relevant. This way, Wordtune will help you deal with writer’s block and also give you relevant information, and suggest stylistic adjustments to boost the quality of your research paper.

Here's an example:

An AI-powered transcription tool, is a valuable asset for researchers, particularly those involved in the social sciences. It streamlines tasks such as transcribing interviews, capturing research ideas, and converting spoken words into text through mobile dictation.

Despite the inherent challenges of AI-generated transcriptions, Otter excels in providing quick and automated solutions, saving significant time for researchers. The tool's support for real-time transcriptions enhances its utility as an efficient starting point for various research endeavors.

Here’s what it might look like to get started:

Benefits and Challenges of Using AI Tools

While these tools offer immense benefits, challenges exist. AI research tools can streamline tasks but must be used responsibly. The responsible integration of AI into research processes ensures a harmonious blend of technological guidance without compromising the researcher's intellectual rigor and creative input.

Let’s look at some of the main benefits and challenges of using ai for research paper writing.

• Time Efficiency: AI tools accelerate tedious tasks, allowing researchers to focus on critical thinking and analysis. It also enables researchers to manage their time better, by focusing more on areas that require manual, intellectual effort.
• Language Precision: Tools like WordVice and Wordtune refine language, elevating the quality of communication in research papers.
• Heuristic support: AI tools can help you get acquainted with new theories, concepts, and arguments while offering personalized support to your learning process. Being better informed will positively reflect in your writing as well.
• Improving overall quality: The tools we’ve seen so far are capable of improving your overall work quality. By helping you with idea organization, extracting information, creating rough drafts, and fine-tuning your writing skills, AI tools can improve your work’s overall quality.

Challenges:

• Overreliance: Researchers must avoid overreliance on AI, preserving their unique insights and analytical skills. This balance ought to be cultivated in budding researchers, allowing them to explore diverse sources of information while remaining anchored in good research practices.
• Potentials for Bias: While we think that AI tools have overcome biases, the truth is quite far from it. Especially in research, AI tools can generate responses that conform to the  restricted data available at the source, betraying its lack of reflexivity and bias-recognition ability.
• Ethical Considerations: Responsible use involves addressing ethical concerns, such as data privacy and algorithmic biases. With the use of AI tools, the necessity for ethical considerations and regulations has become even more important in research.
• Inherent limitations: There are inherent limitations to AI, which of course is a result of its design itself. For example, despite several attempts to overcome AI hallucinations, we still encounter the problems of AI tools generating fake or untrue information, precisely because the model runs on iterative text-predictions in a given context.

Despite the many challenges associated with it, AI tools can indeed propel radical changes in scientific research. Embracing the best AI tools for research paper writing pushes academia into a new era of efficiency and precision.

The synergy between human intellect and AI tools can cultivate a research landscape where technological advancements complement, rather than overshadow, our intellectual endeavors.

As you embark on your next research journey, consider integrating these tools and navigating the intricate path toward academic success with confidence.

1. How do I use AI for academic writing?

2.can ai tools help me brainstorm and outline my research paper.

Yes, AI tools like SciSpace can assist in generating ideas and outlining a research paper. AI tools can also help refine your writing, including the style and overall structure of your ideas.

3.Which is the top AI tool for writing research papers in 2024?

SciSpace is the best AI tool for writing research papers in 2024. It has a plethora of AI tools geared towards locating relevant papers, conducting literature reviews, and finessing your research writing.

4.What are the pros and cons of using AI tools for academic writing?

Pros include time efficiency, language precision, heuristic support, and improved productivity. Cons include overreliance on AI tools, potential for bias, ethical challenges, and limitations of the models themselves.

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Top 16 Digital Tools That Every Researcher Should Know About

Using digital tools for researchers effectively can be the difference between an average and an excellent piece of research. But today, with the long list of research tools available online, it is only natural for busy researchers to be baffled when it comes to making the right choice for specific needs. With considerations of time, cost, effectiveness and quality, there is a lot to check before you make the choice. We don’t want you to spend hours just looking for the best tools for researchers, so we’ve rounded up some of the most effective digital tools for researchers to make your life simpler.

In this comprehensive article, we have compiled a list of 16 useful online tools for researchers at various stages of the research journey. These tools will streamline your research process, help you stay organized, and provide you with easy access to the information you need. From reference management software to digital libraries, these cutting-edge tools cater to the needs of both experienced and novice researchers alike. Whether you’re working on a major research project or just starting out, this blog will help you get ahead of the curve and make your research journey a tad (we aren’t making big promises) bit easier.

Table of Contents

Why are digital tools for researchers important

Before any digital tools for researchers were introduced, academics had to rely on old-school manual methods that were typically time-consuming, labor-intensive, and also limited in scope. For instance, you had to subscribe to journals or physically visit libraries and spend hours searching and sifting through tomes before finding the most relevant information. And once that was done, the process of organizing, storing, and referencing data was another challenge you had to overcome.

In contrast, online tools for researchers offer a wealth of information and resources at your fingertips today. With the option to search and access vast amounts of knowledge with a few clicks, researchers are able to boost their efficiency and effectiveness at work.

And it’s not just limited to online tools for researchers that allow you to easily store, organize, and manage information, there are a number of tools that can help you hone your writing, check for plagiarism, find the right journal, collaborate with other researchers, and share your knowledge, ideas, and resources. The rapid development of digital tools for researchers have revolutionized the way researchers work, making way for faster innovation and more groundbreaking research.

Types of tools for researchers

There are various types of online tools for researchers to choose from. These tools can be classified into various categories such as planning and management of research projects, literature search, data collection and analysis, reference management, editing and paraphrasing, and collaboration and communication. These digital tools for researchers have revolutionized the way academics work, adding to their time, productivity and effectiveness; this in turn makes research more accessible, efficient, and collaborative. Let’s take a look at some top tools for researchers across these key stages in the researcher journey.

Reference Management Tools

Reference management tools are great time saving tools for researchers. Not only do they allow you to create a library of relevant articles, they help you format your references, detect duplicate entries and replace incomplete references, and even share articles with other researchers. Furthermore, they are also extremely useful tools for researchers when it comes to correctly linking sources and citing referenced articles.

Among the top reference management tools for researchers, Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote are the most widely used.

Zotero has quickly become one of the must-have tools for researchers to capture and preserve high-quality publication data from various sources, including journal articles, websites, newspapers, and PDFs. Its integration with popular Word processors such as Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs allows you to efficiently manage citations and bibliographies as you write. The software’s built-in PDF reader enables you to identify and extract cited quotations and comments, which can be directly saved as notes. What sets Zotero apart is its advanced search feature, which enables users to perform complex searches, such as locating articles added in the last month by mentioning a specific keyword and creating auto-updating collections. Zotero can also identify retracted papers and sends out an alert when you attempt to cite a retracted paper.

Zotero follows the freemium model, where one can get 300 MB in the free version with additional storage available for a fee starting at $20/year .

An offering by Elsevier, Mendeley is among the best reference management tools for researchers that combines an intuitive, user-friendly interface with powerful organizational features. With Mendeley, you can store and manage sources, take notes, collaborate with others, and discover new research in your field. Mendeley’s PDF viewer has an excellent, easy-to-use, built-in capability with the option of editing a document simultaneously with other Mendeley users. ‘Mendeley Notebook’, a feature of Mendeley, helps you collate all your highlights and notes from multiple PDFs. ‘Mendeley Cite’, another of its features, is a citation plugin for Microsoft Word that lets you insert references and bibliographies into your document.

Mendeley is a free citation and paper management tool with up to 2 GB of cloud storage. It has a desktop application, mobile app, and Chrome browser extension, making it a top choice among tools for researchers.

Mendeley offers both a free and a premium version, where users get 2 GB in the free version and additional storage space with pricing starting at $55/year .

Endnote is one of the paid reference management tools for researchers. It allows researchers to insert citations into the text, and simultaneously creates a bibliography with its “Cite While You Write” feature in Microsoft Word. Additionally, one can align and format the article as per the target journal requirements using its “Manuscript Matcher” feature. You can also conduct large-scale literature reviews with Endnote’s powerful analysis tools. Endnote is available in the cloud and accessible anywhere, providing researchers with the flexibility to work from any location.

Endnote offers a range of pricing options, starting at $124.95/year . It is one of the must-have tools for researchers keen on saving time and energy!

Academic Writing Tools

If you are not taking advantage of academic writing tools for researchers, well, you’re missing out on a lot. The range of things academic writing tools can do for you is astonishing – language editing, abstract writing, plagiarism checking and so much more! While there are a number of online tools for reseachers that can help improve your academic writing, here are our top choices in this category that you should know about.

iThenticate

iThenticate by Turnitin is an online plagiarism checker designed specifically for researchers and academics to review their manuscripts prior to journal submission and publication. iThenticate is one of the most popular tools for researchers looking to check their writing for originality and ensure they have cited all sources appropriately.

With its advanced plagiarism detection technology, iThenticate compares a submission to an extensive database of web pages and scholarly content before producing a similarity score and report. Researchers can use this report to eliminate any inadvertent instances of plagiarism and other blunders in their research papers.

The price for an iThenticate license starts at $100 for a manuscript and is valid for multiple plagiarism checks for this single document over a year. If you need to check more than one manuscript, you can opt for an annual license at a higher price.

One of the well-known tools for researchers, Scholarcy is an innovative AI engine that helps you analyze different sections of an article, filter out the noise, and deliver a precise structured summary of the research. Scholarcy doesn’t just condense papers into referenced lay summaries, it highlights key claims and statistics mentioned in the research paper that are most useful to your work.

It also extracts all the tables and figures and links to their cited location in the text, saving researchers hours of time searching for the most relevant papers. The smart AI engine is also a great tool for researchers looking to generate lay summaries that can help promote their research to a broader audience

You can use the free Scholarcy browser extension on Chrome or Edge to create summary flashcards online or build your own personal interactive library with a subscription of $7.99 per month.

Scrivener is among the underrated tools for researchers that can help make researchers’ lives simpler if used effectively. It has a user-friendly interface that allows researchers to easily organize their research notes, documents, and outlines. Scrivener gives you three ways to organize your projects: the Binder – which lets you manage folders and text, the Outliner – which helps you outline your research before you write it, and the Corkboard – to help you plan and organize your ongoing tasks.

Scrivener also has a mobile app that syncs with your devices ensuring everything is in one place. This makes it a great option for those who want to walk around and research ideas or take notes on your phone.

Scrivener offers a free trial period, with lifetime licenses available from $63.56 for MacOS and Windows.

Paperpal is as multifaceted as a Swiss Knife and stands tall among online academic writing tools for researchers. With in-depth language and grammar checks, instant and precise academic translations, relevant subject-specific writing recommendations, and critical technical checks, its suite of tools has you covered from the first draft itself. Use the Paperpal for Word plug-in and improve your language as you write in Microsoft Word, including real-time suggestions on vocabulary and phrasing.

Turn to Paperpal for Web to enhance your content with instant checks to ensure error-free language and grammar, clarity, and readability. Choose Paperpal for Manuscript if you have a manuscript ready for submission; its comprehensive language and technical checks ensure your work meets journal guidelines by flagging problem areas that could lead to desk rejection.

The best part about Paperpal, also something that makes it different from other more generic grammar editing tools, is that it is tailored for researchers and academic writing. You can get up to 500 edits for free on Paperpal for Word and Web or enjoy unlimited support at just $99 per year. Paperpal for Manuscript gives you an edited version of your article with suggestions in track changes for just $29.

Project Management Tools

There are several online tools for researchers to manage and organize their work, including keeping track of task completion, setting deadlines, and just having everything in one place. Four tools for researchers that must be there in your productivity kit are Trello, GanttPRO, Evernote, and My Research Projects.

You can use Trello to visually organize your ideas on its boards with the help of interactive cards. These cards can be used in multiple ways – you can create lists, assign tasks, message and tag those you are collaborating with, link files, add due dates–all on the virtual “back” of the card. You can also drag cards between lists, copy cards that you use often (or rather, use the cards as templates), and send cards to other boards. Basically, you can see your entire research process on a single Trello board.

This is a useful tool for researchers involved in large collaborative projects that span the globe. Trello has a free version that offers limited features with pricing models starting at $5 a month.

GanttPRO is another tool for researchers that helps you organize your thoughts better. A Gantt chart timeline on GanttPRO is the best way to visualize tasks, know their start and end dates, and track your progress along the way. The vertical and horizontal axes in a Gantt Chart present a visual summary of how various aspects of your research project are progressing, which allows you to address specific tasks that need extra or immediate attention.

GanttPRO is hosted in the cloud, which makes is easily accessible. It offers users a free trial with the option to choose from plans starting at $7.99 per month.

A productive way to jot down notes and ideas and sort through your research materials, Evernote is one of the most popular online tools for researchers. With Evernote, you can organize your research by a simple notebook structure to keep similar notes together or creating tags and folders for specific purposes.

You can save webpages, articles, or screenshots to your Evernote notebook and use the handy multimedia feature to enhance these by adding new text, images, documents, and even audio messages captured with its inbuilt recorder. Evernote also helps you sync your notes across devices so you can manage your notes across multiple platforms.

The basic version of Evernote lets you create and save notes but has limitations on storage space. You can buy more storage by opting for a paid subscription plan, which is currently available from $5.83 a month at ongoing discounted prices.

My Research Projects

My Research Projects by Researcher.Life is designed for researchers and helps you plan, manage, and communicate your work effectively. It promises end-to-end support in transforming your research into a well-written manuscript with suggestions on suitable journals for your research and guidance on the most relevant literature to cite. You can use the comprehensive submission readiness check to ensure your manuscript meets journal guidelines, with checks for language quality, structural completeness, clarity and consistency, and mandatory declarations. You can also generate detailed article summaries to help you convey your research findings more effectively.

My Research Projects lets you check one manuscript and get a detailed report for free by subscribing to Researcher.Life. You can unlock premium checks for multiple manuscripts by upgrading to the Prime Pack for $99 a year.

Academic Search Engines

As researchers you are expected to keep up with the latest developments in your own and related research fields. Yet, with the exponential growth in research output, this is far from easy. This is what makes academic search engines invaluable to academics searching for relevant scientific information. They use keywords to help researchers find, access and read about the latest most relevant research, including peer-reviewed articles, genuine information, author home pages, and university websites.

Google Scholar, R Discovery, and Scopus are our top tools for researchers in this category.

R Discovery

R Discovery is a strong contender when it comes to the best literature search and reading tools for researchers. An AI-powered app for researchers, R Discovery boasts of an expanding library of research content that includes over 100 million research papers across 9.5 million topics and more than 32,000 journals worldwide. It uses your topics of interest to create a personalized reading feed, with suggestions on top reads, smart summaries, and other features to help you discover the right research in minutes.

This includes open access articles, preprints, and pay-walled content (accessible through institutional credentials) across all major subject areas, including biology, medicine, philosophy, political science, environmental science, social sciences, and psychology. The best part is that this app for researchers continually upgrades its features and eliminated predatory journals to ensure you have access to reliable research that works for you.

R Discovery is one of the many tools for researchers developed by Researcher.Life and is completely free to install and use. It is available on both mobile and web, allowing for streamlined reading on your preferred device.

Google Scholar

If you’re an academic, you probably have used Google Scholar sometime in your research journey. It is one of the most used tools for researchers and acts as an online search engine for academics looking for scholarly literature and relevant sources to cite. It is tailored for academics, which means you can use different keywords to look up various research articles, theses, books, and conference papers to support your research study.

Researchers can also search for authors, journals, and other titles and can even create an account to save their search results. The one drawback here though is that you will need to keep searching until you find related research, and even then you will still need to browse through these individually to find the most relevant content for your research topic.

Another popular academic search tool for researchers is Scopus, an offering by Elsevier that is very similar to Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic. The largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research with over 1.7 billion cited references, Scopus houses content indexed from more than 25,000 active titles and 7,000 publishers, all carefully vetted and selected by an independent review board.

With Scopus, you can look for articles, journals, and any other sources that will help you write better research. You can also refine your literature search by filtering for author name or affiliation among others. Scopus also has analytical tools to help you visualize and compare research data – that is, you can view author, journal, and article impact metrics through the detailed research output and trends reports that Scopus provides.

Scopus works as an API that can be integrated into an institution’s repository or research information management systems. While it is free to use for non-subscribers, there is limited access to content with additional costs to access paywalled articles on this platform.

Journal Selection Tools

Given the enormous number of scholarly journals around and new ones coming up every year, it can be hard to select the best journal for your research paper. Despite its challenges, the process of finding the perfect journal, which is respected, relevant, and reliable, is one of the most critical tasks to get right for researchers. This is why good online journal finders are invaluable tools for researchers.

Elsevier’s Journal Finder tool and the Global Journal Database (GJD) are two pretty effective journal selection tools for researchers.

Journal Finder

The Journal Finder tool by Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of peer-reviewed journals across disciplines, is a great solution for authors looking to shortlist journals for their work. Just use relevant keywords, titles, or your research paper abstract to get a list of recommended Elsevier journals that publish research similar to yours.

Its intelligent machine learning algorithm uses terms specific to the corresponding research field to generate the best matches for your article. You can choose from the top of the list or sort this further using filters based on your preferences. The Journal Finder also lists journals with open-access publishing options and those that cover multidisciplinary research fields.

Elsevier can be used for free to search for journals related to your research.

Global Journal Database

The Global Journal Database, developed by Researcher.Life, comprises of more than 43,000 journals indexed in reputed public directories like Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, and Web of Science. Researchers can search for relevant journals using the title or ISSN, similar topics, research paper abstracts, and even manuscripts; the advanced AI engine will use this to generate the best journals for you.

Each journal recommendation comes with a detailed journal report that has key information about shortlisted journals, including publisher details, journal metrics, author instructions, the editorial review process, and even a list of the latest articles published. With the Global Journal Database, you can see where your preferred journal is indexed and browse its publishing history to better understand its scope. The broad journal coverage, multiple search modes, and detailed journal reports make this an exceptional tool for researchers, simplifying and speeding up the often-daunting journal selection process.

The Global Journal Database is available free with a Researcher.Life Essentials Pack subscription.

Wrapping Up

Researchers everywhere are on a quest to uncover new insights and come up with ground-breaking research. Choosing the right digital tools for researcher and using these effectively can make your journey from brainstorming to breakthroughs a smoother, easier, and faster one.

If you’re looking for a seamless transition between various tools, choose Researcher.Life, which brings together innovative solutions to accelerate and optimize each stage of your research journey. Turn to Paperpal the next time you’re perplexed by language nuances, swipe through R Discovery’s reading recommendations to keep up with the latest developments, manage your research effectively with My Research Projects, or find the right journal for your paper with the Global Journal Database. Experience Researcher.Life and its many bespoke tools for researchers.

Editage All Access is a subscription-based platform that unifies the best AI tools and services designed to speed up, simplify, and streamline every step of a researcher’s journey. The Editage All Access Pack is a one-of-a-kind subscription that unlocks full access to an AI writing assistant, literature recommender, journal finder, scientific illustration tool, and exclusive discounts on professional publication services from Editage.  

Based on 22+ years of experience in academia, Editage All Access empowers researchers to put their best research forward and move closer to success. Explore our top AI Tools pack, AI Tools + Publication Services pack, or Build Your Own Plan. Find everything a researcher needs to succeed, all in one place –  Get All Access now starting at just $14 a month !    

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Citation Management and Writing Tools: Research & Collaboration Tools

• LaTeX and BibTeX
• Other Citation Tools

Collaborate with Colleagues

• Google Drive Create documents, spreadsheets and more to share with a group.
• Overleaf Access Overleaf Pro+ accounts through MIT Libraries.
• Dropbox Paper

Read, Organize, and Annotate PDFs

• ReadCube Papers Read, annotate, and organize PDFs. Create teams for collaboration. **Requires a subscription.
• GoodReader Robust PDF reader for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Manage, read, and annotate files.
• foxit PDF Reader Annotate, collaborate, and share PDFs.
• Petal Reference Manager Petal is the world’s first and only AI-powered reference manager. Using OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model (same engine as chatGPT), Petal enables direct and dynamic interaction with your research library. Automatic metadata extraction. Drag & drop, import existing reference lists (BibTeX), and create collections to stay organized.

Store and Organize Files

• Dropbox Link your personal account to MIT for additional storage
• Evernote Capture, organize, and share notes from anywhere. Share notes with friends and colleagues.

Need more help with organizing and storing your files/data related to your research? Check out the Store your data  guidance from the Data Management Services team or contact them directly at [email protected] .

Get help with citation software

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• Writing Strong Research Questions | Criteria & Examples

Writing Strong Research Questions | Criteria & Examples

Published on October 26, 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on November 21, 2023.

A research question pinpoints exactly what you want to find out in your work. A good research question is essential to guide your research paper , dissertation , or thesis .

All research questions should be:

• Focused on a single problem or issue
• Researchable using primary and/or secondary sources
• Feasible to answer within the timeframe and practical constraints
• Specific enough to answer thoroughly
• Complex enough to develop the answer over the space of a paper or thesis
• Relevant to your field of study and/or society more broadly

Table of contents

How to write a research question, what makes a strong research question, using sub-questions to strengthen your main research question, research questions quiz, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about research questions.

You can follow these steps to develop a strong research question:

• Choose your topic
• Do some preliminary reading about the current state of the field
• Narrow your focus to a specific niche
• Identify the research problem that you will address

The way you frame your question depends on what your research aims to achieve. The table below shows some examples of how you might formulate questions for different purposes.

Using your research problem to develop your research question

Note that while most research questions can be answered with various types of research , the way you frame your question should help determine your choices.

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Research questions anchor your whole project, so it’s important to spend some time refining them. The criteria below can help you evaluate the strength of your research question.

Focused and researchable

Feasible and specific

Complex and arguable

Relevant and original

Chances are that your main research question likely can’t be answered all at once. That’s why sub-questions are important: they allow you to answer your main question in a step-by-step manner.

Good sub-questions should be:

• Less complex than the main question
• Focused only on 1 type of research
• Presented in a logical order

Here are a few examples of descriptive and framing questions:

• Descriptive: According to current government arguments, how should a European bank tax be implemented?
• Descriptive: Which countries have a bank tax/levy on financial transactions?
• Framing: How should a bank tax/levy on financial transactions look at a European level?

Keep in mind that sub-questions are by no means mandatory. They should only be asked if you need the findings to answer your main question. If your main question is simple enough to stand on its own, it’s okay to skip the sub-question part. As a rule of thumb, the more complex your subject, the more sub-questions you’ll need.

Try to limit yourself to 4 or 5 sub-questions, maximum. If you feel you need more than this, it may be indication that your main research question is not sufficiently specific. In this case, it’s is better to revisit your problem statement and try to tighten your main question up.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

The way you present your research problem in your introduction varies depending on the nature of your research paper . A research paper that presents a sustained argument will usually encapsulate this argument in a thesis statement .

A research paper designed to present the results of empirical research tends to present a research question that it seeks to answer. It may also include a hypothesis —a prediction that will be confirmed or disproved by your research.

As you cannot possibly read every source related to your topic, it’s important to evaluate sources to assess their relevance. Use preliminary evaluation to determine whether a source is worth examining in more depth.

This involves:

• Reading abstracts , prefaces, introductions , and conclusions
• Looking at the table of contents to determine the scope of the work
• Consulting the index for key terms or the names of important scholars

A research hypothesis is your proposed answer to your research question. The research hypothesis usually includes an explanation (“ x affects y because …”).

A statistical hypothesis, on the other hand, is a mathematical statement about a population parameter. Statistical hypotheses always come in pairs: the null and alternative hypotheses . In a well-designed study , the statistical hypotheses correspond logically to the research hypothesis.

Formulating a main research question can be a difficult task. Overall, your question should contribute to solving the problem that you have defined in your problem statement .

However, it should also fulfill criteria in three main areas:

• Researchability
• Feasibility and specificity
• Relevance and originality

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Breaking Down the Writing Process with AI

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The instructional practices shared in this article are ideas for exploration, not requirements for any instructor. They were developed by Northwestern IT Teaching and Learning Technologies in partnership with the Provost’s Generative AI Advisory Committee . Please note:

• Accessing Copilot via your Northwestern credentials is the recommended path for accessing a generative AI tool. Questions about whether a risk assessment has been performed or an institutional contract exists for a specific AI tool can be directed to the Northwestern IT Information Security Office ( [email protected] ). Procurement of new AI tools should follow university processes and policies regarding licensing and third-party risk assessments.
• Output from large language models (LLMs) can include false or incorrect information. Verifying accuracy via other sources is a critical practice for instructors, students, and staff to engage in when using LLMs.

For students and instructors, the introduction of generative AI via chatbots like ChatGPT in late 2022 introduced significant and complex challenges to core aspects of teaching and learning in higher education. Currently, the Northwestern Office of the Provost supports instructors in choosing their own level in which to integrate generative AI into their courses and includes it in the University’s Principles Regarding Academic Integrity . For many, involving generative AI in skills like writing is, at best, an uncomfortable position. For some, exploring generative AI with their students or asking them to critique ChatGPT output has been a productive way to engage students in examining the impact it can have on their writing.

When we think about generative AI and writing, a great place to start is with this short video featuring Elizabeth Lenaghan , director of The Cook Family Writing Program and associate professor of instruction, where she reiterates the importance of teaching writing in the generative AI age via a process model. The Cook Family Writing Program has created specific resources on generative AI and writing , which are referenced throughout this article. This article looks at four distinct parts of the writing process and offers step-by-step instructions on how to incorporate generative AI in ways that can help grow students’ understanding of generative AI and their own writing skills.

Through the University’s Microsoft license, Northwestern students, faculty, and staff have access to Microsoft’s implementation of the GPT 4.0 large language model through Microsoft Copilot (available only through a smartphone app or internet browser). Access to Copilot is important because when you are signed in with your Northwestern account, any data you put into the chat is covered by Northwestern’s contract with Microsoft for data protection so that Microsoft does not use it for product improvement or to train their AI models. This is the closest interface to ChatGPT, but only provides data protections when signed in with a Northwestern Microsoft Account.

Growing Critical Generative AI Users  

As fall quarter starts, understanding the basics of how large language models work is critical for instructors and students, regardless of the extent to which you do or do not allow students to use generative AI in your class. We recommend watching and sharing the videos created by the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence included below to build a common language and understanding with your students about how generative AI works and its potential impact when used in their writing. To use generative AI tools well, students need to employ critical thinking, information literacy, and writing skills.

Writing Activities  

Activity 1: brainstorming with generative ai  .

Description:

Many students find it challenging to select a topic to write about. AI can assist by suggesting and refining ideas, much like guidance from a friend or instructor.

• Without using generative AI, students brainstorm ideas related to a given topic, generating lists of ideas.
• Students review their lists to identify common themes and core concepts. For each core concept, they write a summary sentence explaining its significance.
• Students pick one summary to enter as a prompt in Copilot to explore new angles and extend their initial ideas. Be specific in the prompt about what kind of output you want to see. For example, "I am sharing an idea for an essay I will write. Give me a list of five points I should cover. Here's the idea: [Summary sentence]."
• Have students discuss these new perspectives in pairs, small groups, or larger group discussions to gain insights. (Source: Leon Furze )

AI Learning Objectives:

Students will:

• Generate and refine ideas and articulate core concepts.
• Use generative AI tools to enhance their understanding.
• Engage in discussion to develop critical thinking and communication skills.
• Begin to understand limits of generative AI LLM tools.

Additional Resource: Brainstorming with (and without AI)

Activity 2: Crafting Thesis Statements with AI  

A clear thesis statement is crucial in writing as it provides direction and focus, guiding the structure and content of the entire piece. While creating a thesis can be challenging, generative AI can assist by offering suggestions and alternatives to help refine and articulate a compelling argument.

• Students start by selecting a topic related to the course content that interests them.
• Students draft a thesis statement focusing on their main argument and its significance.
• Pair students to share their statements, providing feedback to each other on clarity, argument strength, and potential improvements, with constructive criticism and specific suggestions.
• Have students input their thesis statements into a generative AI tool using the prompt, "I wrote a thesis statement, and I want you to provide me with feedback on clarity, argument strength, and potential improvements to the statement. Here is my thesis statement: [THESIS STATEMENT]"
• Have students compare the AI's suggestions with their partner's feedback, noting any unique differences.
• Conclude with a class discussion on their experiences, exploring the value of human versus AI feedback in enhancing writing. (Source: Crystal Camargo)
• Refine their thesis statements by integrating feedback from peers and generative AI.
• Improve their ability to critically evaluate and enhance their arguments.

Additional Resource : Creating a Thesis statement with (and without AI)

Activity 3: Reverse Outlining with AI  

Outlining is a critical step in the writing process that helps students understand the structure and flow of their work. By using a reverse outline with traditional outlining methods and generative AI tools, students can ensure that each paragraph contributes effectively to the overall argument.

• Students select one of their own previously written papers or essays and review it to understand its main points and overall structure.
• Students create a reverse outline by condensing each paragraph into a brief statement capturing its main idea, considering how it contributes to the paper's overall argument or narrative.
• Next, students use a generative AI tool to produce a reverse outline of the same paper and compare it with their own to discover any differences or similarities. Use the prompt, “Create a reverse outline of this document that includes a one- to two- sentence summary of each paragraph. Each summary should include the main idea of the paragraph and how it contributes to the paper's overall argument or narrative. Here is the document: [DOCUMENT TEXT]"
• Encourage reflection on whether the AI highlights points they missed or suggests a different structure and how both outlines align or not with the original intentions for their paper.
• Facilitate a class discussion where students share insights gained. (Source: Ohio College Teaching Consortium )
• Use AI tools to create reverse outlines of their work, comparing AI interpretations with their own.
• Improve their understanding of structure and clarity in writing.

Additional Resource: Outlining with (and without AI)

Activity 4: Draft Feedback with AI Integration  

Students can utilize AI to "read" their draft and receive feedback on missing components, potential counterarguments, and structural improvements.

• Ask students to bring a draft of a paragraph or two to class for feedback.
• Students exchange drafts in small groups, providing and receiving peer feedback focused on structure, clarity, and argument strength.
• Students input their draft into Copilot to receive additional feedback.
• Students compare Copilot’s suggestions with the feedback they received from peers and the instructor.
• After reviewing insights from all sources, students can develop a revision plan.
• Conclude with a class discussion on how AI can complement traditional feedback methods, enhancing students' understanding of their strengths and areas for improvements.

(Source: Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick )

• Integrate feedback from peers, instructors, and generative AI to improve their writing.
• Enhance clarity, coherence, and argument strength in their drafts.
• Understand the role of AI in the feedback process.

Final Thoughts  

When exploring generative AI in your courses, keep the generative AI portion opt-in and share with students how they complete the activity without using generative AI. No matter if or how you utilize generative AI in your course, be explicit with your students about your policies and expectations.

Connect with your community through colleagues, Northwestern writing experts , or request a consultation to talk through any questions you have about using generative AI in the writing process.

Videos to Share with Students     This video describes how LLMs use predictions to create output and how hallucinations can occur.         This video outlines what’s happening when it looks like LLMs are “thinking.”  From Northwestern Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence .

Continue Exploring this Topic

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• Generative AI on Your Terms: Data and Privacy 101
• AI Study Buddy

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• Content Creation

How To Create High-Quality Content

Improve your SEO with high-quality content. Learn what defines it and how to effectively create and present it to your audience.

SEO success depends on providing high-quality content to your audiences. The big question is: What exactly does “high quality” mean?

Content has many meanings. In digital marketing, it simply means the information a website displays to users.

But don’t forget: In a different context with a different emphasis on the word (con tent as opposed to con tent), content is a synonym for happy and satisfied. The meaning is different, but the letters are the same.

If you want to understand content quality online, keep these two different definitions in mind.

Every webpage has content. “High-quality” content depends on contexts like:

• What the needs of your audience are.
• What users expect to find.
• How the content is presented and how easy it is to pull critical information out of it quickly.
• How appropriate the medium of the content is for users’ needs.

What Makes Content High Quality?

This is a complex question that we hope to answer in full during this article. But let’s start with a simple statement:

High-quality content is whatever the user needs at the time they’re looking for it.

This might not be helpful in a specific sense but note this somewhere because it’s a guiding light that has far-reaching implications for your website and audience strategy.

We use this definition because the quality of your content isn’t static. Google and other search engines know this and frequently update search engine results pages (SERPs) and algorithms to adjust for changing user priorities.

You need to bake this idea into your understanding of content and audiences. You can have the most beautifully written, best-formatted content, but if your target audience doesn’t need that information in that format, it’s not “high-quality” for SEO.

If you provide a story when the user is looking for a two-sentence answer, then you’re not serving their interests.

This is especially pertinent with the introduction of generative AI features into search platforms. This is a continuation of a “ zero click ” phenomenon for certain types of searches and why Google doesn’t send a user to a website for these searches.

Defining & Meeting Audience Needs

SEO professionals have many different ways of conceptualizing these ideas. One of the most common is “ the funnel ,” which categorizes content into broad categories based on its position in a marketing journey.

The funnel is usually categorized something like this:

• Top of the funnel : Informational intent and awareness-building content.
• Middle of the funnel : Consideration intent and product/service-focused content.
• Bottom of the funnel : Purchase intent and conversion content.

While it’s helpful to categorize types of content by their purpose in your marketing strategy, this can be an overly limiting view of user intent and encourages linear thinking when you conceptualize user journeys.

As Google gets more specific about intent , such broad categorization becomes less helpful in determining whether content meets users’ needs.

Build a list of verbs that describe the specific needs of your audience while they’re searching. Ideally, you should base this on audience research and data you have about them and their online activity.

Learn who they follow, what questions they ask, when a solution seems to satisfy them, what content they engage with, etc.

Then, create verb categories to apply to search terms during your keyword research. For example:

User Intends To Purchase

If the user is looking for something to buy, then high quality probably looks like a clean landing or product page that’s easy to navigate. Be sure to include plenty of detail so search engines can match your page to specific parameters the user might enter or have in their search history.

Product photos and videos, reviews and testimonials, and Schema markup can all help these pages serve a better experience and convert. Pay particular attention to technical performance and speed.

Remember that you’re highly likely to go up against ads on the SERPs for these queries, and driving traffic to landing pages can be difficult.

User Intends To Compare

This could take a couple of different forms. Users might come to you for reviews and comparisons on other things or to compare your benefits to those of another company.

For this content to be successful, you need to be dialed into what problems a user is trying to solve, what pain points they have, and how specific differences impact their outcomes.

This is the old “features vs. benefits” marketing argument, but the answer is “both.” Users could want to see all the features listed, but don’t forget to contextualize how those features solve specific problems.

User Intends To Discover

This intent could describe a user looking for industry news, data to support their research, or new influencers to follow.

Prioritize the experience they’re seeking and ensure that the discovery happens quickly.

This could look like adding text summaries or videos to the top of posts, tables of contents to assist with navigation, or page design elements that highlight the most critical information.

User Intends To Learn

If a user intends to learn about a topic, a long, well-organized post, video, or series of either may serve them best. This content should be in-depth, well-organized, and written by genuine topic experts. You may need to demonstrate the author’s qualifications to build trust with readers.

You must consider the existing knowledge level of your target audience. Advanced content will not satisfy the needs of inexperienced users, while basic content will bore advanced users.

Don’t try to satisfy both audiences in a single experience. It’s tempting to include basic questions in this type of content to target more SEO keywords, but think about whether you’re trading keywords for user experience.

For example, if you write a post about “how to use a straight razor” and your subheadings look like the ones below, you’re probably not serving the correct intent.

• What is a straight razor?
• Are straight razors dangerous?
• Should I use a straight razor?

The chances are high that someone landing on your page “how to use a straight razor” doesn’t need answers to these basic questions. In other words, you’re wasting their time.

User Intends To Achieve

A slightly different intent from learning. In this instance, a user has a specific goal for an action they want to perform. Like learning content, it should be written by subject matter experts.

If the person creating this content doesn’t have sufficient first-hand experience, they won’t effectively guide users and predict their real-world needs. This results in unsatisfying content and a failure point of many SEO content strategies.

In SEJ’s SEO Trends 2024 ebook , Mordy Oberstein , Head of SEO Brand at Wix, said:

“One trend I would get ahead of that aligns with Google’s focus on expertise and experience is what I’m coining “situational content.” Situational content attempts to predict the various outcomes of any advice or the like offered within the content to present the next logical steps. If, for example, a piece of content provides advice about how to get a baby to sleep through the night, it would then offer the next steps if that advice didn’t work. This is “situational” – if X doesn’t work, you might want to try Y. Situational content creates a compelling form of content I see more frequently. It does a few things for the reader: It addresses them and their needs directly. It’s more conversational than standard content (an emerging content trend itself). To predict various outcomes and situations, you have to actually know what you’re talking about. That latter point directly addresses E-E-A-T. You can only predict and address secondary situations with expertise and experience. Most of all, situational content indicates to the user that a real person, not a large language model (LLM), wrote it.”

The difference between “learn” and “achieve” intents can be difficult to see. Sometimes, you might need to satisfy both. Pay careful attention to these types of content.

User Intends To Check

Misunderstanding when a user just wants to “check” something can cause you to waste resources on content doomed not to perform, and another failure point of SEO strategies. If what a user needs can be solved in a few sentences, you’re in zero-click territory.

For example, ‘How to tie a bowtie’.

That is, Google will serve users an answer on the SERP, and they may not click a link at all. You may want to target these types of queries as part of longform content for other search intents using good content organization and Schema markup.

That way, you can give your authoritative and in-depth content opportunities to show up in rich results on SERPs, and users might click through if they see more information available or have follow-up questions.

You should consider these intents part of your SEO strategy, but think of them as awareness and branding tactics. AI features such as AI Overviews in Google seek to surface quick answers to queries. It will be much harder to acquire clicks on SERPs where features like this are activated.

If you struggle to understand why well-written content is losing traffic, you should assess whether you wrote hundreds of words to answer a query that only needed 30.

More intents exist, and to complicate matters further, they are not exclusive to each other in a single piece of content. Comparison and discovery intents, for example, often combine in listicles, product comparisons, and titles like “X alternatives to X.”

More reading about user intent:

• How People Search: Understanding User Intent
• Creating Content That Satisfies Search Intent & Meets Customer Needs
• Understanding Buyer Intent Keywords
• Google Patent: Rewriting Queries Based on Context to Meet Intent

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Content Quality Signifiers

While there’s no quantifiable answer to what good content means, there are many ways to evaluate it to ensure it contains key signs of quality.

Google’s content guidelines provide some questions you can ask yourself to objectively assess your content’s quality.

The SEO content mantra is E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness .

Google uses many signals to approximate these concepts and apply these signals to ranking algorithms. To be clear, E-E-A-T are not ranking factors themselves. But they are the concepts that ranking systems attempt to emulate via other signals.

These concepts apply to individual pages and to websites as a whole.

Experience : Are the people creating content directly knowledgeable about the subject matter, and do you demonstrate credible experience?

Expertise : Does your content demonstrate genuine expertise through depth, accuracy, and relevance?

Authoritativeness : Is your website an authoritative source about the topic?

Trust : Is your website trustworthy, considering the information or purposes at hand?

In its content guidelines, Google says this about E-E-A-T:

“Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them. For example, some content might be helpful based on the experience it demonstrates, while other content might be helpful because of the expertise it shares.” Understanding these concepts is critical for building a content strategy because publishing content with poor E-E-A-T signals could impact your website as a whole . Google’s language downplays this potential impact, but it’s critical to know that it’s possible. It’s tempting to assume that because a website has high “authority” in a general sense or in one particular area, anything it publishes is considered authoritative. This may not be true.

If you chase traffic by creating content outside your core areas of authority and expertise, that content may perform poorly and drag the rest of your site down.

More reading about E-E-A-T:

• Google E-E-A-T: What Is It & How To Demonstrate It For SEO
• Is E-E-A-T A Ranking Factor?
• Google’s E-E-A-T & The Myth Of The Perfect Ranking Signal
• E-E-A-T’s Google Ranking Influence Decoded

Creating Effective SEO Content

This article focuses on written content, but don’t neglect multimedia in your content strategy.

The thought process behind content should go a little bit like this:

Audience > Query (Keywords) > Intent > Brief / Outline > Create

You can also express it as a series of questions:

• Audience: Who is our audience?
• Query : What are they searching for?
• Intent : Why?
• Brief : How can we best assist them?
• Create : What does exceptional user experience look like?

Keyword Research For Content

Keyword research is a massive topic on its own, so here are some key pieces of advice and a few additional resources:

• Look at the SERPs for the keywords you target to understand what Google prioritizes, what your competitors are doing, what success looks like, and whether there are gaps you can fill.
• Cluster related keywords together and develop a content strategy that covers multiple branching areas of a topic deeply.
• High search volume often means high competition. Allocate your resources carefully between acquiring lower competition positions and fighting for a slice of competitive traffic.
• Building a robust catalog of content focused on long-tail keywords can help you acquire the authority to compete in more competitive SERPs for related topics.

More reading about keyword research:

• Keyword Research: An In-Depth Beginner’s Guide
• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: The Ultimate Guide
• Keyword Mapping: A Beginner’s Guide

Briefing SEO Content

Once you have performed your research and identified the intents you must target, it’s time to plan the content.

SEO professionals may not have the required knowledge to create content that demonstrates experience and expertise – unless they’re writing about SEO.

They’re SEO specialists, so if your website is about finance or razor blades, someone else will need to provide the knowledge.

Briefing is critical because it allows the SEO team to communicate all that hard work and research to the person or team creating the content. A successful brief should inform the content creators:

• The target keyword strategy , with suggestions or a template for the title and subheadings.
• The purpose of the content for the user : What the user should learn or be able to accomplish.
• The purpose of the content for the business : Where it falls into the marketing strategy and relevant KPIs.
• Details such as length, style guide or voice notes, and key pieces of information to be included.

Creating SEO Content

Your research should guide the format of your writing.

Remember, intent impacts the usability of different types of content. Prioritize the information most likely to solve the user’s intent.

You can do this by providing summaries, tables of contents, videos, pictures, skip links, and, most importantly, headings.

Use The Title & Headings To Target Keywords & Organize Information

The title of a page is your primary keyword opportunity. It’s also the first thing users will see on a SERP, which impacts CTR. Match the title to your target query and think about effectively describing the content to entice a click. But don’t misrepresent your page for clicks.

Your primary responsibility in SEO content is to set expectations and then deliver on them. Don’t set if you can’t deliver.

HTML heading formats help users navigate the page by breaking up blocks of text and indicating where certain topics are covered. They’re critical to your on-page SEO, so use your keywords.

Expectations are as true for headings as for titles. Headings should be descriptive and useful. Prioritize setting an expectation for what the user will find on that part of the page and then delivering on that expectation.

More reading about headings:

• How To Use Header Tags: SEO Best Practices
• 14 Most Important Meta And HTML Tags You Need To Know For SEO
• Google Explains How to Use Headings for SEO
• 16 Free Title Generator Tools For Writing Better Headlines
• How To Write A Headline: 10 Tips For Getting It Right

Get To The Point

Whether content should be long or short is subjective to its purpose. All SEO content should be as short as possible while achieving its goals. “As short as possible” could mean 4,000 words.

If you need 4,000 words to achieve your goal, then use them. But don’t add any more than you need.

This is a call to avoid rambling, especially in introductions. Do you  really  need to cite the projected growth of an industry just to prove it’s worth talking about?

Not unless you’re writing a news story about that growth. Cut that sentence and the link to Statista from your introduction. (No shade, Statista, you rock.)

Features like skip links can also help with this. Give users the option to skim and skip directly to what they need.

Use Internal Links To Connect Your Pages Together & Provide Further Reading

Internal links are the bedrock of SEO content strategies. They are how you organize related pages and guide users around your website. They also spread the SEO value of your pages to the pages they’re connected to.

In the keyword research section, we suggested that you create clusters of keywords and topics to write about – this is why. You build authority by covering a topic in-depth and creating multiple pages exploring it and all its subtopics.

You should link between pages related to one another at contextually important points in the content. You can use this tactic to direct the SEO power of multiple pages to one important page for your strategy or your business.

Contextually relevant links that properly set expectations for what the user will find also contribute to a good site experience.

More reading about internal linking:

• Internal Linking is Super Critical For SEO
• Sentence-Level Semantic Internal Links For SEO
• Internal Link Structure Best Practices to Boost Your SEO
• How Should We Internally Link Hub & Spoke Content For SEO?

Use Personal Experiences And Unique Expertise To Stand Out

AI presents numerous challenges for SEOs. Anyone can quickly create content at scale using generative AI tools.

The tools can replicate competitors, synthesize content together from myriad sources, and enable breakneck publishing paces. This poses two core problems:

• How do you stand out with so much AI content out there?
• How do you build trust in audiences looking for legitimate experts?

For now, the best answer is to lean into the E-E-A-T principles that Google prioritizes.

• Tell human stories with your content that demonstrate your experience and expertise.
• Use Oberstein’s “situational content” principle, mentioned earlier in this article, to connect with your audience’s experiences and needs.
• Ensure that content is created by verifiable experts, especially if that content involves topics that can impact the audience’s well-being (YMYL.)

SEO Content Is Both A Strategy & An Individual Interaction

It’s easy to focus on what you need from users: what keyword you want to rank for, what you want users to click, and what actions you want them to take.

But all of that falls apart if you don’t honor the individual interaction between your website and a user who needs something.

Audience-first content is SEO content. Content is a core function of SEO because it’s the basis of how humans and algorithms understand your website.

More resources: 

• AI Agnostic Optimization: Content For Topical Authority And Citations
• Trending Content Output Compared In ChatGPT, Gemini, And Claude
• Content Marketing: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to What Works

Featured Image: Art_Photo /Shutterstock

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