I’m preparing a switch to Mac for my work computer, and are currently enjoying searching for new research software. One of the most exciting apps I came across for a long time is Papers. It’s a os x - software aspiring to be the iTunes of the research world. This means an iTunes-alike interface for all your pdfs and other documents, with cataloging, searching, reading, not-taking and export features. Vincent Noel writes about using Papers together with the new bibliographic features in Word 2008 for mac, but he also reports about some unsucsess due to word 2008 for Mac.
Archive for the 'Research Tools' Category
Ma.gnolia is a social bookmark service, like Delicious. Magnolias group- and archive-features makes it perfect for research. I have been using Magnolia beside Delicious since it was released two years ago, as a general bookmark manager. Recently I made a new account which will serve only as a reference repository for my articles and related research projects. You can check out how it looks by visiting my Magnolia page. At the time of writing it only contains 4 bookmarks, but it will grow rapidly.
Magnolia has all features of other bookmark managers, such as rss, bookmarklets for easy bookmarking, contact making, tags with tag cloud. But the features below stands out as perfect for research.
The archiving feature
The archive feature makes it possible to freeze a web page in time. This is useful if you have a reference to a web page which later is changed or removed. Due to copyright only you can view the archive copy, but you can take a screenshot and send it to however question the reference.
The group feature
Click the thumbnail for a bigger image of the group feature. In short I can give the group a name corresponding to my project or article I am writing. I can give it a custom avatar and it has its own tag cloud. When I am saving bookmarks I get the option to save to the group directly or I can do it later. A bookmark can belong to multiple groups, but it does not have to be in a group. You can have as many groups you want and the groups can be either completly open, open for viewing but only invited users can collaborate, or it can be completly privates - as my article project i the screenshot.
Issuu is a service for creating and sharing publications based on pdf-files. The publication above, I made in Impress (Powerpoint of Open Office) and exported to pdf and uploaded to Issuu. From Issuu I got a piece of code I pasted into this blog post. The embed code from Issuu can be emedded on practically all kinds of web pages.
Click on the arrow to use the mini reader or click somewhere else to read in a bigger reader.
The document Uncertainty and the Ghost of Plato is a kind of brainstorming text, and I used Impress to structure it. The presentation form can also be handy in future conversations and conferences.
The Center of Enviromental Science at the University of Maryland freely shares a library with reserach symbols for Adobe Illustrator. The IAN Symbol Libraries contains over 1500 vector symbols in different areas related to science and research. If you do not use Adobe Illustrator they also offer eps and svg versions. “The symbols allow diagrammatic representations of complex processes to be developed easily with minimal graphical skills”.
If you don’t use Adobe Illustrator you can use MS Powerpoint with the eps-files or Inkcscape with the svg-fils and probably the eps-files too. Inkscape is a free Illustrator-like software for Windows, Mac OS X as well as Linux. Inkscape is one of the best applications in the open source family. I recommend it warmly for all kind of vector-based drawings.
This is the brand new research blog of Peter Giger. I blog about social knowledge- and research processes including tips about technology in relation to reserch.
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