Speaker 1: Hey everyone, and welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I'm summarising the top apps, websites, resources that you can use as a researcher, as a student, as a PhD student, a master's student, and these are tools that will really help you along the way. I know that nowadays we have so many resources at our fingertips, we have so much free access to amazing tools that help us reference, that help us summarise papers and a lot of it are just on the internet, we don't know about them and I thought I would share them with you. I've done a video similar to this like three or four years ago now so I've tried to make sure that they're all different. I'll tag that one down below as well so you can go and watch it if you want to see a different list but these I think are a lot more specialised, they are definitely a lot more like AI based and will help you a lot more I think than my last list so keep on watching. Okay the first one and I couldn't do this video without sharing a referencing software or referencing tool and for this one I have suggested Mendeley, you also have Endnote, it's a tarot as well but Mendeley is my personal favourite, I absolutely love it because you are able to integrate it into all of your everyday doings so you're able to integrate it into your thesis writing, into your dissertation writing, essay writing, your literature review because you're able to save references and save citations on your platform and then you can use the word toolkit to be able to then insert them into your writing as you write, which is amazing. I don't think, I mean there probably is another tool that does this, but Mentally does it really well. I've got a whole video on how this works, again I'll leave that link down below as well if you want to go and watch it, but definitely a referencing tool is a must. Then for number two, I'm going to go for Notion. Now, Notion is a very new one for me. I've only started using it in the past year or two. However, it is a really great tool to be able to keep recording of all the things that you do, your meetings, your schedule, your lab records, your presentations, the data that you have, like everything can kind of sit within Notion. And Notion is just an amazing platform that allows you to kind of modify and personalize your interface and your desktop space. So like you can have a Notion template that's quite basic that you just kind of list some writing and you kind of take some notes and you can have a huge database, a huge workspace that is like a second brain that allows you to input all this information for your studies during your PhD. And if you're a new PhD student I would definitely think about exploring this because you can really have your whole PhD within Notion and it's accessible, you can use it on your phone, your laptop, you can share it with others, you can share pages with your collaborators and I think it's quite powerful. So if you're someone who is thinking about where to keep all your information, definitely consider Notion. The next is a website called Scholicy. And Scholicy is something that I've discovered quite recently, about six months ago. It is a really cool website app tool that allows you to summarise reading and summarise research papers quite easily. So they actually give you a summarisation tool that allows you to easily absorb and retain course reading and it helps you use like summary cards to allow you to like appraise articles and chapters and to give you summaries and highlights and tables for your data. It gives you key statements for that for that particular paper, it helps you reference and it gives you like link it links to other referencing sources so you don't have to like manually look for them. It just gives you like a nice synopsis of papers and I think it's a really nice tool to be able to use and as a researcher, as a student who's reading lots of paper and lots of literature all the time, I think it's something to really take a look at. The next one is called Connected Papers and this is a really really nice like neat website that you will definitely enjoy if you're interested in like papers and like literature and kind of reading around your topic quite nicely and identifying papers that you haven't found before. So this is a website that allows you to get a general overview of an academic field. So you enter a paper that you're interested in, so that could be like a key paper for your particular research and then what it will do is it will build you like a nice graph of similar papers in your field and then you can like build more graphs for other papers and you can get a really good visual understanding of the trends and in the field that you're working in. You can also like find papers that you might have missed out on and like other papers that are recently kind of published that you haven't picked up straight away. You can also find other derivative works as well, so papers that are similar to yours and it just pulls out like research for you, it pulls out papers for you, it shows you how it's connected and it gives you a nice pathway to be able to give you like a starting point for your reading at least and identify papers that you may not have identified before. The next is called Paper Digest and again this is quite similar to ScholarSea, it summarises research papers for you in just a couple minutes. They've only got, I say only, but they've got two million papers on their system, which it obviously is a lot, but it's not exhaustive, so it's not everything, but it's a nice website that allows you to summarise everything, so you can read it in just three minutes, so you can quickly grasp the core ideas of the paper, and you can see sort of like what the abstract is about, and you can see the introduction, the objectives, you can see what you can learn, so it gives you like the results summarised, the discussion summarised, and yeah I feel like it's just a lovely way of summarising papers that you are interested in reading but it just allows you to reduce that reading time initially before you decide whether or not you want to delve deeper into a paper. So when you're reading for a literature review or to write an abstract or something, it's nice to read a bunch of wider papers rather than reading loads of papers but just reading the whole paper and spend all your time doing that. So this is a really lovely way of summarising a paper. My next two are proofreading, writing, grammarly-ish style ones, and this one's called Writeful, and this is a website that allows you to write, paraphrase, copy, edit and loads of other things as well when you're writing your academic writing. So it's actually based on AI, so it helps you replace words that could be written better, could be written clearer, it helps you edit your writing carefully, spot mistakes, and so when you're someone who is writing a thesis, writing a dissertation, you just need that kind of instant correction initially before you kind of do the full like in-depth proofread. I think this is like a really nice lovely option. And then on the same vein my next one is called PaperPal and this is very similar to Writeful, it's just by a slightly different group and I think this is also a very lovely website that gives specific language suggestions to help you write better and faster. It helps give suggestions to rephrase confusing sentences, it checks for any like structural or technical inconsistencies, it detects any grammar issues, and it's just lovely because you can actually, I'm not sure about Writeful, but I know with Paperpal you can actually have a plug-in into your Word documents as you write, it will suggest corrections for you and it's actually really, really sleek. The next one is, I feel like I mentioned this in a video somewhere. But the next one is BioRender. I love BioRender. It's just like, it's just for scientists, like for an academic, it's so beautiful. It is a website that allows you to generate those academic images. So those images within papers, and there's professional like scientific images where you can see like pathways and like innovations and like what's going on. That this is where you can build that like it's gorgeous. And so it's so nice for if you have a a presentation coming up or like some sort of um poster or if you've discovered a new like pathway or trying to explain something because you know sometimes I find that some of those images and papers they're great but they're just too detailed for what I need for that particular demonstration. I'm just interested in one of those pathways so the fact that you can actually like use biorender and draw your own pathway and identify and highlight the bits that only you are interested in. I love, I love that. So they've got, they've got a bunch of like pre-made icons, they've got templates from like over 30 fields of life sciences. It's just a nice way of building those professional like scientific templates and without using PowerPoint basically to draw everything. Okay the ninth, the penultimate but definitely not like, this is not an order of importance because I feel like we're going backwards now. The next one is Academic, the Academic Phrase Bank by Manchester University. This is the best resource that I have found in a very long time. I recommend it to all of my students, I recommend it to anyone that comes to The Page Doctor. It's such a cool tool and I can't believe that it's free. Like you know when you find something that's so useful and you're like, it feels illegal to have access to this. That's what Academic Phrase Bank feels like to me. It's essentially a massive academic phrase bank of words, phrases, terminology, sentence starters, sentence enders, and ways of beginning your sentences to write in a more cohesive, clear, and academically viable way. And I feel like sentence starters are great because you're able to take the starter, and use the beginning bit, and then I find that I can just like flow better with my with my writing, because sometimes like you know the idea, you know what it is that you want to say, but by having the sentence starter it gives you like that like it gives it kind of overcomes that activation energy of starting that sentence. Once you've started the sentence you can then continue on with it. So yeah I really love it I feel like it's applicable in all different areas they've got areas like referring to sources, how to describe your methods, how to describe results, findings, conclusions and then within that you've got so many different sections about like how to define terms, how to describe quantities, giving examples, sticking transitions, writing about the past, and it gives so, that like I can't, you have to just check it out, like there's so much detail and I think every academic needs to take a look at this list to be able to like really refine their writing. And the last one, but yeah definitely not least, is Canva and I never see Canva being recommended for academics or PhD students. But I genuinely, in the last five years, I don't think I would have been able to do anything I've done in my academic life without the use of Canva. Canva is so great. You can use it for a poster, like designing a poster is so much better than PowerPoint. You can use it for, it's got so many like icons and images and tools and just like templates that you can use. You can use it to design a presentation, like a PhD defence presentation or just a lab meeting. They've got templates for defence, a PhD defence, they've got templates on there for that. You can use it to design anything. Honestly, I can't. Biorender, like I mentioned earlier, that's a bit more for academic images because of the icons that they have. But Canva is just, you can literally use it for anything. and I feel like as a PhD student, as a researcher, an undergrad student, like Canva is a great tool that you can just use to design anything that you need that is, that PowerPoint I feel like limits you to a little bit. So yeah, Canva is such a great tool, I love it so much. I've used it so much in my personal life, in my like professional life, designing like courses, thumbnails on YouTube, social media, like I really have if there's one app that tops the list of apps that I've used in life at all Canva would be right up there for sure. So yeah I hope this list was a nice list and I hope that this presented you with a new tool that you could hopefully use and be and discover and I will try to do a part two to this because there are loads more as well but I just wanted to like cherry pick the best ones I've discovered in the last like three years or so before the previous video. And yeah if they have any others leave them in the comments down below and I will check them out as well and I'll add them to maybe part two and I'll see you guys in my next one. Bye.