Writing an academic paper is a combination of art and science. Master it, and you will hold a powerful weapon in your hand that will help you to succeed in your career.
As a research-active academic, research scientist or PhD researcher, you will be expected to write a lot – from research proposals, through reports for funders and sponsors, through our popular research articles.
If you enjoy writing and analysing data, doing research can be heaven!
It definitely is for me! As a research-active academic, I love to dive into data to find new correlations and trends and develop new technologies, analytics tools and frameworks. You can read some of my scientific work here.
There are lots of research tools that can support your writing and data analytics during your research project.
Following on my previous post on research tools to supercharge your literature review, I decided to share the research tools for data analysis and research that I currently use.
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Research tools for writing and collaboration
It goes without saying that an efficient word processing program is essential to achieve high productivity in your writing.
Yes, you can write your work in Notepad, which is a fundamental text program introduced by Microsoft. But would this be an efficient research tool? Well, you can answer this for yourself.
MS Word
MS Word is the most popular word processing software. It is rich in features and capabilities, allows you to use style and document templates, integrates with reference management tools, like Mendeley.
Introduction of Office365 also enabled you to edit your documents and collaborate in the cloud, which is awesome.
Yet, unless your institution has an academic licence, it can be pricey compared to other options.
Google Docs
If you are working with a limited budget, Google Docs can be an exciting alternative to MS Word. I see it as a successful response of Google to years of Microsoft’s monopoly in this space.
Google Docs has nearly the same capability as MS Word, except it does not support Mendeley. There is, however, and alternative – PaperPile – but considering user feedback, its developers still have some work to do to make it as effortless to use as the combo of Mendeley and MS Word.
It goes without saying that Google Docs is a cloud-based word processor, which supports real-time collaboration and documents sharing via Google Drive. It is possible to use it offline, but you need to download an appropriate plugin beforehand.
