The Most Useful PhD Apps / Software That You Haven't Heard Of | Essential PhD Student Tools

hey everyone and welcome back to my channel in today's video I'm summarizing the top apps websites resources that you can use as a researcher as a student as a PhD student a master's student and these are tools that will really help you along the way um I know that you know nowadays we have so many resources at our fingertips we have so much free access to amazing tools that help us reference that help us summarize papers and a lot of it are just on the internet we don't know about them and I thought I would share them with you I've done a video similar to this like three or four years ago now so I've tried to make sure that they're all different I'll tag that one down below as well so you can go and watch it if you want to see a different list but these I think are a lot more specialized they are definitely a lot more like AI based and will help you a lot more I think than my last list so keep on watching okay the first one and I couldn't do this video without sharing a referencing software or referencing a tool and for this one I have suggested mendely you also have endnote for tarot as well but mentally is my personal favorite I absolutely love it because um you are able to integrate it into all of your everyday doings so you're able to integrate it into your thesis writing into your dissertation writing essay writing your literature review because you're able to save references and save citations on your platform and then you can use the word uh toolkit to be able to then insert them into your writing as you write um which is amazing I don't think I mean there probably is another tool that does this but mentally does it really well I've got a whole video on how this works again I'll leave that link down below as well if you want to go and watch it but definitely a referencing tour is a must then for number two I'm gonna go for notion now notion is a very new one for me I've only started using it in the past year or two however it is a really great tool to be able to keep recording of all the things that you do your meetings your schedule your lab records your presentations the data that you have like everything can kind of sit within notion and notion is just an amazing platform that allows you to kind of modify and personalize your interface and your desktop space so like you can have a notion template that's quite basic that you just kind of list some writing and you kind of take some notes and you can have a huge database a huge workspace that is like a second brain that allows you to input all this information um for your studies during your PhD and if you're a new PhD student I would definitely think about exploring this because you can really have your whole PhD within notion and it's accessible you can use it on your phone your laptop you can share it with others you can share pages with your collaborators and I I think it's quite powerful so if you're someone who is thinking about where to keep all your information definitely consider notion the next is a website called scholar C and Scholar C is something that I've discovered quite recently about six months ago it is a really cool and website app tool that allows you to summarize reading and summarize research papers quite easily and so they actually give you a summarization tool that allows you to easily absorb and retain course reading and it helps you use like summary cards to allow you to like appraise articles and chapters and to give you some reason highlights and tables for your data and it gives you key statements for that for that particular paper it helps you reference and it gives you like link it links to other referencing sources so you don't have to like manually look for them it just gives you like a nice synopsis of papers and I think it's a really nice tool to be able to use and as a researcher as a student who's reading lots of paper and lots of literature all the time I think it's something to really take a look at the next one is called connected papers and this is a really really nice like neat website site that you will definitely enjoy if you're interested in like papers and like literature and kind of reading around your topic quite nicely and identifying papers that you haven't found before so this is a website that allows you to get a general overview of an academic field so you enter a paper that you're interested in so that could be like a key paper for your particular research and then what it'll do is it will build you like a nice graph of similar papers in your field and then you can like build more graphs for other papers and you can get a really good visual understanding of the trends and in the field that you're working in you can also like find papers that you might have missed out on and like other papers that are recently kind of published that you haven't picked up straight away you can also find other derivative works as well so papers that are similar to yours and it just pulls out like research for you it pulls out papers for you it shows you how it's connected and it gives you a nice Pathway to be able to give you like a starting point for your reading at least and identify papers that you may not have identified before the next is called paper digest and again this is quite similar to scholar C it summarizes research papers for you in just a couple minutes they've only got obviously I say only but they've got two million papers on their system which it obviously is a lot but it's not exhaustive so it's not everything but it's a nice website that allows you to summarize everything and so you can read it in just three minutes so you can quickly grasp the core ideas of the paper and you can see sort of like what the abstract is about and you can see the introduction the objectives you can see what you can learn so it gives you like the results summarize the discussion summarized um and yeah I feel like it's just a lovely way of summarizing papers that you are interested in reading but it just allows you to reduce that reading time initially before you decide whether or not you want to delve deeper into a paper so when you when you're reading for a literature review um or to write an abstracts or something it's just it's it's nice to read a bunch of wider papers rather than reading loads of papers but just reading the whole whole paper and spend all your time doing that so this is a really lovely way of summarizing a paper my next two are proofreading writing grammarly-ish style ones and this one's called rightful and this is a website that allows you to write paraphrase copy edit and loads of other things as well and when you're writing your academic writing so it's actually based on AI um so it helps you replace um words that could be written better previous and clearer it helps you edit your writing carefully spot mistakes and so when you're someone who is writing a thesis writing a dissertation you just need that kind of instant correction um initially before you kind of do the full like in-depth proofread I think this is like a really nice lovely option and then on the same vein my next one is called paper pal and this is very similar to rifle and it's just by a slightly different group and I think this is also a very lovely website that gives specific language suggestions to help you write better and faster it helps give suggestions to rephrase confusing sentences it checks for any like structural or technical consistencies it detects any grammar issues and it's just lovely because you can actually I'm not sure about rightful but I know with paper pal you can actually have a plug-in into your word um document so as you write it will suggest Corrections for you and it's actually really really Sleek the next one is I feel like I mentioned this in a video somewhere but the next one is buy a render I love by render it's just like it's just for scientists like for an academic it's so beautiful it is a website that allows you to generate those academic images so those images within papers and the professional like scientific images where you can see like Pathways and like Innovations and like what's going on um that this is where you can build that like it's gorgeous and so it's so nice for if you have a presentation coming up or like some sort of um poster or if you've discovered a new like pathway or you're trying to explain something because you know sometimes I find that some of those images and papers they're great but they're just too detailed for what I need for that particular um demonstration I'm just interested in one of those Pathways so the fact that you can actually like use buy a render and draw your own pathway and identify and highlight the bits that only you are interested in I love I love that so they've got they've got a bunch of like pre-made icons they've got templates from like over 30 fields of Life Sciences it's just a nice way of building those professional like scientific templates and without using PowerPoint basically to draw everything okay the ninth um the penultimate but definitely not like this is not an order of importance because I feel like we're going backwards now and the next one is academic the academic phase Bank by Manchester University this is the best resource that I have found in a very long time I recommend it to all of my students I recommend it to anyone that comes to the page doctor and it's such a cool tool and I can't believe that it's free like you know when you know when you have you find something that's so useful you're like it feels illegal to to have this act to have access to this that's what academic phase Bank feels like to me it's essentially a massive academic phrase Bank of um words phrases terminology sentence starters sentence Enders and ways of beginning your sentences to write in a more cohesive clear um and academically viable way and I feel like since the starters are great because you're able to take the starter and use the the beginning bit and then it I found I find that I can just like flow better with my with my writing because sometimes like you know the idea you know what it is that you want to say but by having the sentence starter it gives you like that like it gives it kind of overcomes the activation energy of starting that sentence once you've started the sentence you can then continue on with it so yeah I really love it I feel like it's applicable in all different areas they've got areas like um referring to sources how to describe your methods how to describe results findings conclusions and then within that you've got so many different sections about like how to define terms um how to describe quantities uh giving examples signing transitions writing about the past and it gives so that like I can't you have to just check it out like there's so much detail and I think every academic needs to take a look at this list to be able to like really refine their writing and the last one but yeah definitely not least is canva and I never see canva being recommended for academics or PhD students um but I I genuinely in the last five years I don't think I would have been able to do anything I've done in my academic life and without the use of canva canva is so great you can use it for a poster like like designing a poster it's so much better than PowerPoint you can use it for it's got so many like icons and images and tools and just like templates that you can use you can use it to design a presentation you're like a PhD um like defense presentation or like just a lab meeting they've got templates for defense a PhD defense got templates on there for that um you can use it to design like any anything we honestly like I don't I can't buy render like I mentioned earlier that's a bit more for like academic images because of the icon that they have but canva is just you can literally use it for anything and I feel like as a PhD student as a researcher um on undergrad student like canva is a great tool that you can just used to design anything that you need that is that PowerPoint I feel like limits you to a little bit um so yeah canva is such a great tool I love it so much I've used it so much in my personal life in my um like professional life designing like courses thumbnails on YouTube social media like I really have if there's one app that tops the list of things apps that I've used like in life at all camera will be right there for sure um so yeah I hope this list was nice list and I hope that this presented you with a new uh tool that you can hopefully use and be and discover um and I will try to do a part two to this because there are loads more as well but I just wanted to like cherry pick the best ones I've discovered in the last like three years or so before the previous video um and yeah if they have any others leave them in the comments down below and I will check them out as well and I'll add them to maybe part two and I'll see you guys in my next one bye

Channel: Dr Amina Yonis

Views: 187,353

Keywords:

Id: thp8tovZtzY

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022