The best websites for researchers and academics
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The web is a treasure trove of resources that can make the life of researchers and academics much easier. Here, I discuss my favourites.
Keeping up-to-date
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a great resource for quick literature searches. It is much more intuitive than “proper” research databases like PubMed or PsychINFO, because it uses the same logical operators as regular Google. So, you can combine several keywords with AND and add wildcards like attent* to search for anything starting with “attent” like attention and attentive. You can also create your own profile to make your work more easily discoverable. That’s easily done in a few clicks. Subsequently, Google Scholar will recommend articles that are similar to your own published articles. This can be quite useful to stay on top of the literature.
ResearchGate
ResearchGate is similar to a social media platform but it’s solely dedicated to research. You can create a profile for yourself, add your papers, and follow the updates of other researchers. It also has forums to ask for answers from other researchers. Seeing the updates from other researchers can be very useful to see what other people are working on. In contrast to discovering papers via search engines, the papers on ResearchGate can be added to projects. So, you can easily se how the most recent preprint from a lab relates to their previous papers. I also like that ResearchGate produces reports about who viewed or cited my papers so I can connect to people with similar interests. Fortunately, curating the profile does not take a lot of work. In most cases, ResearchGate will suggest adding papers automatically once they are published.
Connected Papers
Connected Papers is a discovery tool that is extremely useful when exploring a new area. For example, you might have come across an inspiring article and want to learn more about the context of this research…
