Particularly once you get to college and beyond in academia, it seems like your life is spent nose-in-book, coffee-in-hand, trying to find out what the heck your next paper’s going to be about. You highlight passages, and then forget why; you spill coffee on your book; you fall asleep. Not the most fun activity.
Thankfully, between Firefox and Google, doing research has been made a whole lot easier. Here are five awesome tools to make learning and writing a more enjoyable process (as long as you don’t spill your coffee on your computer- bad news):
Google Books (here): Google is working on projects with a huge number of libraries, across America, to bring the books you read online. With the growing number of books on Google, you can search for a particular word in a book (great for finding quotes), find places to buy it, find other things by the author, and use a number of other great features. Whether you’re reading, skimming or quote-hunting, Google Books makes reading for research a lot easier.
Google Scholar (here): Take Google search, remove all the ads, blogs, and amateur content, and you get Google Scholar. Working with Google Books, it helps you find professional and scholarly content on almost any subject. One word of advice- be broad. A search for “Black Panthers” didn’t bring much, but* “Civil Rights” brought a lot of information, even about the Panthers. If you need good sources and articles for papers, Google Scholar’s your first and often last stop.
Zotero (here): Bibliographies are usually a pain in the you-know-what, but not with Zotero. This easy, lightweight Firefox extension lets you store all your research materials in a much easier way than through bookmarks, as well as collecting bibliographic information for you, and storing it in any number of ways.* The site has a lot more information about its many great features, like compatibility with Office and Wordpress. If you use Firefox for school, this is a must have.
Fireshot (here): Ostensibly a screen shot tool, Fireshot does a lot more. The Firefox extension takes an image of the Web page you’re on, not just your screen. You can then draw on the image, edit it, highlight it, and export it to other editors. This is a great tool to use with Google Books to save pages and quotes you might need, but is useful on any site for saving and later finding the relevant information.
PDF Printer (here):PDF is just about the only file format you can guarantee will open and work on any computer. Word documents get messed up, web pages go funny, but PDF is good to go. With PDF Printer, you can “print” any page or document to a pdf file, which then is saved and available for use later. It’s as simple as printing anything else, it just adds itself as a different printer to your computer. For compiling sources, this is a great one.
There are many more ways to help you research better, but these are the ones I use most, and have made research a much more pleasant and efficient process.
What do you do when you research? Good ‘ol highlighter and book, or something more high-tech? Let us know in the comments!
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