Online Resources for Academics?

December 3, 2011 7:29 AM

I'm making a list of online apps and resources for academics – anything to help increase productivity, manage information, help with referencing and citation, class management or planning (more for instructors and TAs than students), research tools... maybe even smart phone applications. Any suggestions/recommendations?

I'm mostly looking for free or low-cost resources, and the list is wide-ranging, but mostly for career academics.

posted by taz to education (18 answers total)

The DiRT wiki might be good for this.
posted by unknowncommand at 7:32 AM on December 3, 2011

EndNote is the gold standard reference and citation manager. Its not free but it is worth it.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:35 AM on December 3, 2011

EasyBib and Citation Machine are two online citation generators that aren't perfect but may be useful for students.

I also really like Dropbox as a way to store documents across multiple computers. Very useful running between the various school computer labs and home.
posted by lilac girl at 7:49 AM on December 3, 2011

Make sure they know about using the referencing functions in Microsoft Word.
posted by tamitang at 7:52 AM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

Lately I've decided that BibDesk and the natbib package are just about the best thing that's ever happened to my academic life. And they're free!
posted by ootandaboot at 8:08 AM on December 3, 2011

Scrivener for writing.

Reviewing/commenting tool in Microsoft Word and Pages.

These Excel templates for Education.

AirSketch for the ipad.

Moodle.

Evernote.

Also, I'd love to see a copy of this list when you're done!
posted by Ms. Toad at 8:16 AM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

ProfHacker should have all of this and more.
posted by k8t at 8:29 AM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

Zotero was a lifesaver in grad school when I needed to keep track of a vast amount of journal articles, google books/archive.org books, etc.
posted by kittenmarlowe at 9:03 AM on December 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm another fan of BibDesk, particularly because it turns out you can copy and paste directly from MathSciNet.

The todonotes package for LaTeX is the lazy person's way of making easy-to-see 'Fill this in' notes. (It's bit more sophisticated than the commands everyone just wrote on the fly.)

My recent discovery that you can tell vim-LaTeX which file to compile is one of the more exciting things that has happened recently.

If it is not already apparent, I am wedded to LaTeX. This is pretty much by necessity, but I have tex-ed papers that could have been written in Word.

I've recently started using UPad on the iPad for taking notes. I'm kind of on the fence about the whole concept, but the app is good. (I'm using the lite version and haven't coughed up the $5 because it's been so long since I've paid for software that I find the idea off-putting.)
posted by hoyland at 9:12 AM on December 3, 2011

I use Mendeley for citation management, Toggl for time management, Wunderlist for task management, and Dropbox for access to my documents across devices. All have associated iPhone apps. I also end up using Google Docs a lot for collaborative work.
posted by quiet coyote at 9:27 AM on December 3, 2011

(I should also say that I tried Zotero and ended up not liking it and switching over to Mendeley, for reasons that I can no longer remember. YMMV.)
posted by quiet coyote at 9:29 AM on December 3, 2011

Dropbox, Evernote, Box and SugarSync all are useful for file sharing and I am happy to report that all have BLACKBERRY apps. Not everyone has or wants a damn iPhone.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 10:47 AM on December 3, 2011

Scrivener, Evernote, Publish or Perish...
posted by shivohum at 11:47 AM on December 3, 2011

For grading: dropbox & goodreader
In class: airsketch, keynote, pages
posted by Cuke at 6:40 PM on December 3, 2011

Endnote used to be the gold standard. Now it's pretty much dead in the water. Use Mendeley instead. It's free, collaborative, cross-platform and quite powerful. You can have it manage both PDFs and citations, export to bibtex (if that's how you cite) or just cite directly from Mendeley into Word (free plugin works across platforms).

Scrivener for writing.

Dropbox for collaborating. Academic referrals (i.e. signups with a .edu address) get 2x storage (500mb for each instead of 250mb up to 18gigs). You can use Filestork to accept assignments via the web straight into Dropbox. There is also Dropbox Forms.

SpiderOak is similar but more secure than Dropbox.

Pinboard archival account ($25/year) is very useful for academics. Anything I bookmark is archived (including videos, pdfs etc). So very useful when content disappears so frequently off the web.

Etherpad (one of many free etherpad services) is incredibly useful for group writing in real time with authorship colors and versions. Simpler and faster than Google docs and requires no sign up.

EVO is like Skype for academics. You can share presentations while video conferencing.

Rstudio is a free IDE for the R statistical environment. So very useful for academics.

Speaker Deck for sharing and embedding presentations.

Prezi for making presentations/ lectures.
posted by babbyʼ); Drop table users; -- at 7:31 PM on December 3, 2011

My top picks: Mendeley, DropBox, Google Scholar Citations.
posted by bluedaisy at 9:36 PM on December 3, 2011

You guys are great! This all helped me out a lot. I used nearly everything, and those I didn't are on my list for future updating.
posted by taz at 8:24 AM on December 4, 2011

You're probably asking about discipline-general aids, but if you also want information about resources for particular disciplines, then I draw your attention to Philpapers, which is an incredible research tool for philosophers.
posted by painquale at 8:32 PM on December 5, 2011