40 Essential Digital Resources for Researchers and Students

Academic Search & Open-Access Tools:

• Google Scholar (1): A free web search engine for scholarly literature across many disciplines. Use it to find articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
• ResearchGate (2): A professional network where scientists share publications, ask questions, and find collaborators.
• Academia.edu (3): A platform for researchers to upload and track papers. It facilitates sharing and discovery of new research.
• Connected Papers (4): A visual tool that maps connections between papers, helping you discover related work and key developments.
• Semantic Scholar (5): An AI-powered literature search engine from the Allen Institute for AI, offering smart search and paper recommendations.
• Open Research Library (6): An online catalog of open-access books (over 20,000 titles) from many publishers, aiming for a single searchable library.
• JSTOR (7): A well-known digital library of back issues of academic journals, books, and primary sources (note: often institutional access is needed).
• DOAJ (8): The Directory of Open Access Journals, a community-curated list of peer-reviewed open-access journals across disciplines.
• CORE (9): An aggregator of open-access research papers from thousands of repositories worldwide, freely available to use.
• arXiv (10): A free repository of preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, and related fields (over 2 million articles).

Reference Management & Writing Tools:

• SSRN (11): An open-access repository for social science and humanities papers and preprints.
• Scopus (12): A large abstract and citation database covering science, social science, and more, useful for citation tracking.
• Web of Science (13): Clarivate’s citation indexing service encompassing thousands of major journals (over 12,000 high-impact ones) across disciplines.
• ORCID (14): A unique, non-proprietary identifier for researchers, ensuring your work is correctly attributed.
• Google Keep (15): A quick online note-taking app that syncs across devices, good for jotting down ideas and to-dos.
• Mendeley (16): A reference manager and PDF organizer that also offers social features for researchers.
• Zotero (17): A free, open-source tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research sources (PDFs, web pages, etc.).
• EndNote (18): A commercial bibliography/reference manager used to manage citations and format manuscripts.
• Overleaf (19): An online collaborative LaTeX editor for writing and publishing academic papers with templates.
• Grammarly (20): An AI-powered writing assistant that checks grammar, spelling, and style in your writing.

Editing & Plagiarism Checkers: 

• ProWritingAid (21): A writing coach tool that highlights grammar, style, and consistency issues.
• Hemingway Editor (22): A tool that points out complex sentences and common errors to make writing clearer.
• iThenticate (23): A plagiarism detection service (by Turnitin) for academic publishers and researchers.
• Turnitin (24): A well-known academic integrity platform (text-matching service) used by educators worldwide.
• Copyscape (25): An online plagiarism checker that identifies duplicate content on the web.
• ResearchRabbit (26): An AI-driven literature discovery tool that builds a visual graph of related papers.
• Sci-Hub (27): A controversial “shadow library” website that provides free access to millions of paywalled research papers by bypassing publishers (use responsibly).
• Library Genesis (28): A shadow library offering free downloads of millions of scholarly articles and books.

Productivity, Community & Learning: 

• Trello (29): A visual task-management tool with boards and cards to track research projects and deadlines.
• Notion (30): An all-in-one workspace for notes, databases, and planning – great for organizing research workflows.
• Evernote (31): A note-taking and task-management app to capture text, images, and more in organized notebooks.
• Scrivener (32): A writing software designed for long documents (theses, books) with tools to outline, draft and organize research.
• Publish or Perish (33): A free application that retrieves and analyzes academic citations (h-index, total papers, etc.) from sources like Google Scholar.
• Thesis Whisperer (34): A popular blog (by Dr. Inger Mewburn) offering advice and community for PhD students.
• PhD Comics (35): A famous webcomic by Jorge Cham that humorously chronicles graduate student life.
• PhDForum (36): Online discussion forums for PhD students to share tips, support and academic insight.
• LaTeX Templates (37): Free templates (e.g. on Overleaf or CTAN) for formatting dissertations, CVs, posters and papers.
• DataCamp (38): An online learning platform focused on data science, Python, R and statistics courses.
• Coursera (39): A leading MOOC provider offering courses, specializations and degrees from universities worldwide.
• Udemy (40): A huge online course marketplace where experts teach thousands of courses on tech, research skills, and more.