The best websites for researchers and academics

The web is a treasure trove of resources that can make the life of researchers and academics much easier. Here, I discuss my favourites.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

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.

Google Scholar landing page. Image by the author.

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…