Introduction

Academic tools make the researcher’s job easier and enhance the research experience. Technology has brought many benefits, and researchers can use various tools to make the research process easier. Gone are the days when researchers had to visit libraries physically to find research resources or manually provide citations. Technological changes, especially the arrival of digital tools, have endowed researchers with plenty of tools to use for academic research. This article will tell you about the five academic tools that a scholar must know.

What are the five academic tools that are useful for research?

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is the top choice of academic scholars globally, and it is one of the most helpful academic tools. Google Scholar lets you find and retrieve research articles, books, magazine articles and reports related to your subject area. You can find literature on any subject and topic on Google Scholar. It is easy to use and does not require a paid subscription; you must log in with your Gmail account and search the relevant literature for your research. Google Scholar is very easy to use, and you can take the following steps to find the relevant resources:

•           Enter the keywords in the search bar

•           Narrow down your research by setting the relevance to a specific time; you can also select a custom range

•           Sort by relevance and sort by date option helps you narrow down the scope of your search

•           You can also select the type of resources you want to retrieve

•           Save the resources to “My Library” for later usage

Google Scholar is among those academic tools that help you identify past developments in your subject area. Also, you can find the related articles, citations, and the source’s further extension (if any) by selecting the option “Cited by”. It helps in forward-searching and enables you to identify the research papers that have built upon the identified source. However, most often, you might not be able to access the complete article using Google Scholar. For that purpose, we recommend using the below-mentioned tool.

Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub is one of the most useful academic tools that can help you retrieve research articles. Sci-Hub was developed to facilitate the researchers. It is a digital library that contains millions of research papers in almost every subject area. Google Scholar helps find the articles, but sometimes you might not get full access to the research papers. You can just copy the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the source article and use it to find it through Sci-Hub. You can insert the article’s DOI, URL or full name in the search bar to find the relevant research article. You can also download the research article to your computer and save it for later usage. If you cannot find the relevant articles for your research, there is nothing to worry about because you can always get help from expert researchers at Buy Assignment Online.

Mendeley

Mendeley is among the most useful academic tools for providing citations and references. Mendeley helps you provide citations automatically for the research resources used in the research. You can generate citations and references in any of the standard citation formats, such as APA, MLA, and Harvard style. Mendeley also helps you perform literature research and makes your job quite easier. You can find several articles and identify whether they are relevant to your research or not by just reading the abstract. Mendeley can be downloaded to your computer or laptop, and you can install a plug-in extension of Mendeley in MS Word. Moreover, you can also install Mendeley’s extension in Google Chrome, and you can retrieve the citation sources and references of any website you visit to find academic resources.

Grammarly

The word count in research papers is usually quite high. Grammar and spelling errors are overlooked when writing in a flow so as not to disrupt the flow of ideas. But, after you have finished your research, the subsequent phase is to fix the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. If you want to manually proofread the document, it can be time-consuming. Although MS Word has a spelling and grammar check feature, it is fairly basic. Grammarly is one of the most efficient academic tools for proofreading and editing. You can edit and proofread your research papers and academic assignments using Grammarly. Grammarly’s basic version lets you correct the spelling and some punctuation errors, but the free version does not let you correct grammatical errors. Also, the free version does not have a plagiarism check option. The paid version, which is reasonably priced, allows you to benefit from the extra features. The paid version includes suggestions about grammatical errors, incorrect sentences, faulty parallelism, passive voice to active voice, appropriate usage of words and advanced punctuation corrections. Also, Grammarly helps you bring a varied writing style to your research papers by providing multiple-word suggestions that fit right into the context. Additionally, you can check the plagiarism using the paid version of Grammarly.

Google Forms

Google forms is one of the most useful academic tools used for data collection. Data collection is an integral part of the research, and in the past, researchers had to manually collect the data from respondents. But now, with the help of Google forms, you can create a survey questionnaire online and circulate it among the respondents. You can create a Google form easily and formulate questions that are relevant to your research objectives and hypothesis. Google forms help you draft open-ended and close-ended research questions. You can also create a Likert scale by including the rating scale questions useful for quantitative and qualitative research studies. Google form is a systematic method for collecting and compiling data into a single excel sheet. Also, Google forms automatically retrieves the pertinent information, and you can set a time limit for the respondents to respond on time.

Conclusion

Academic tools are essential for carrying out research. These tools save time and facilitate you by finding the relevant sources, helping with citations, proofreading and editing, plagiarism check and data collection.