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Research resources

See our collection of tools to help with the research process, and resources to pursue a career in academia. We'd like to thank Effective Thesis for their work in putting this collection together. 

 

 

Resources covering multiple research skills:

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  • Tips on Doing Impactful Research, created by Silvana Hultsch and Ronja Lutz, explains how you can increase your ability to do impactful research.

  • How to do great research, a site giving advice on many aspects of doing research, aimed primarily at PhD students in computer science but featuring a lot of broadly applicable advice.

  • How to do research that matters discusses techniques for producing impactful, decision-relevant research.

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Meta-learning:

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Productivity:

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Developing a research question:​​

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Open Science and pre-registration:

Pre-registration

 

Doing reproducible and ethical science

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Statistics

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Data analysis

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Writing skills

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Writing a literature review

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Presenting your research

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Tools to help with the research process:

Improving your workflow

  • Elicit is a GPT-3 powered research assistant that helps with various tasks, including classifying datasets and finding researchers similar to a list you started with, which may be helpful if you’re looking for a supervisor. Students automatically receive access as part of our coaching process.

  • SMMRY automatically summarises text to save you time.

  • The Brain allows you to organise ideas in non-linear mind maps. We think it’s the best mind-map tool and may be particularly useful during creative research phases and when working in open/new research fields.

  • RoamResearch and Obsidian are note-taking tools which present networks of connected notes in graph form.

  • Notion and Workflowy are project management and note-taking apps. The Notion personal plan is free with an academic email address.

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Finding existing data:

General

 

Development economics

 

Social sciences

 

Statistical data

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Literature reviews:

  • Elicit allows you to enter a question and receive answers from research papers.

  • Connected Papers creates a visual overview of your field of study, showing papers that are similar to the paper you started with.

  • Semantic Scholar is a literature search tool that provides one-sentence summaries of papers and shows papers that influenced or were influenced by the paper you are reading.

  • Scite shows the contexts in which a scientific article has been cited and whether the citations were accompanied by supporting or contrasting evidence.

  • LitMaps creates visual maps of citations between research papers and recommends relevant papers.

  • ResearchRabbit helps you search for papers and authors, monitor new literature and visualise research landscapes.

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Reference Managers:

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Running a successful study:

Collections of resources

  • For psychology and potentially other social sciences, the Compendium of Methods and Stats Resources links to many useful papers, tools and tutorials for the planning and analysing of research studies. 

 

Recruiting Participants

 

Building a Study

Tools for building online experiments and behaviour change programs:

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Publishing:

Where to publish your paper (both sites provide recommendations based on your abstract):

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Funding:

Many universities have their own university- or faculty/school-based mini-grants programs to support students with particularly promising research or extra-curricular plans (e.g. exceptional research proposals for their undergraduate, masters or PhD thesis or plans to attend conferences or research-based events to support their research). Try googling something like “special research grants [name of your university]” to find whether yours offer this. The 2021 scholarship guide outlines scholarships available in various universities across multiple countries for undergraduate, masters and PhD students. This site features EA funding opportunities for a number of different cause areas and disciplines and you can also check this post for additional opportunities. For alternative protein research specifically check out the Food System Research Fund. 

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Awards:

International, all disciplines

 

International, discipline-specific

 

Germany

 

UK

 

Prizes from other countries coming soon… Your own department/university likely run their own thesis awards. Consider applying – it is usually a good way to show that your thesis is exceptional.

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Internships and other opportunities:

Effective Thesis does regular searches to identify opportunities that are relevant to our recommended research directions, and are particularly suited to students interested in research careers and early-career researchers. If you want to make use of this service, please apply here. Opportunities relevant to Effective Thesis' prioritised research directions can also be found below:

Opportunities can also be found by signing up for the newsletters of the research organisations mentioned in our prioritised research directions profiles. There are also many newsletters linked in this post.

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Careers Advice 

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