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Academic research and thesis is vital part of the educational system, especially at the Postgraduate level.
It can be unnecessarily tedious if one does not have the proper tools for research.
Im going to give a brief overview of some of the tools that will make academic research a lot easier.
Google Scholar
This is an arm of the google search engine that only searches for journals and other research materials. It can allow you download some directly if access is unrestricted to those document. It is the first place you want to visit if your startign a research.
visit scholar.google.com
Mendeley
Mendeley is an application produced by Elsevier. It is a perfect tool for keeping track of all your research materials, and by that i mean journals, word documments, power points, publications etc. It gives you a very organised structure to your research and also allows you to share papers with other researchers as well. Whether you are working alone or in a team, mendeley is definitely the best for the job.
Asides that, Mendeley gives you access to very vast database of research materials to choose from.
Recent versions of Microsoft Office (i.e from 2010 and above) have incorporated the mendeley plugin which enables you to quickly create and insert citations and bibliography into your research.
It also has a google chrome extension that allows you to add documents directly as you browse through search results on google scholar.
To use mendeley visit thier website www.mendeley.com. Idealy you can also download the desktop application and the android version both of which automatically synchronise with the web application giving access to your work any time any where including your own notes and jottings.
It would require you to sign up on elsevier website though.
OpenAccessButton
Most Research websites like ieee.org or springer require payment for access to research journals and publications and this is a major problem for researchers especially in Nigeria. Although some of these journals are free some low rated websites, these websites are obscure and are not easy to come by even with google's help.
The OpenAccessButton is a very handy tool that gives you access to these Journals by searching through its affiliate databases to find and grant access to journals that you would have otherwise had to pay for.
All you need to do is enter the url of the doucment or the DOI of the document and click a button. If the document is available for download on any of its database it presents you with a link to download it.
If it does not find the document with open access it gives you the option to send a message to the author requesting the document.
See...Its that simple. But ofcourse it is a little limited.
To use this tool visit www.openaccessbutton.org
sci-hub
If you thought openaccessbutton was cool wait till you check this out. sci-hub is a russian website whose purpose is to bridge the gap between researchers and quality materials by removing the payment part of aquiring them.
It is registered under so many domains but all work the same way openaccessbutton works except with this guy theres no document it cannot give you full access to. Just like openaccessbutton all you need to do is enter the url or DOI of the document an hit a buttonthen wait for your download to start. Easy peezy lemon squeezy...
some domains you can use are
sci-hub.tw
sci-hub.hk
Publish or Perish
Funny name i know but this guy is a very ineresting tool for searching for journals. Its perk is that it offers impressive specificity even down to keywords. In other words you can search for journals based on keywords or authors or year or anything for that matter. This is very important as it helps you to be sure that you are not plagiarising or doing what someone has already done. It is a desktop application you can simply download.
Download it here
Grammarly
This is sort of a glorified spell checker. It is a web application that goes through your document and offers corrections in grammar semantics. It is a very handy tool to have. It has a desktop version too.
visit www.grammarly.com
SPSS
This is a rather populaar desktop application for statistical analysis. It helps you analyse data collected in questionaires and gives you very detailed results and analysis. I do not have a credible download link for it but if you do find one you will have to buy a license unless you are like me that is always looking for cracks. You can leave me a message if you need the cracked version of SPSS i'm sure we can work out a way to send it to you.
Some other websites you can visit for research are:
Research paper or Books
Then search in the following websites,
for text books , these are the links.
Research can be a whole lot easier if you have the righg tools.
Thanks for reading.