Hi, Veronika, Thanks. Would you please send the relevant link to LaTeX. and ShareLaTeX, then I will add to "Research Tools" mind map.

Thanks, Veronika. I have added https://www.sharelatex.com/ to the "Write Collaboratively" and mentioned you suggested this tools.

Hi Veronika, Once more thanks for your kind feedback.

I'm using Zotero to manage my resources.

Nader,

Some additional tools worth adding:

1)Latex editors

Easy to use LaTeX editor LYX http://www.lyx.org/

A more standard editor is Texmaker http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

2)Task manager

Task Coach http://taskcoach.org/

I use mendeley as a tool for organizing/ annotating the papers I'm reading and the one I've read. It is particularly useful when you have a vague memory of something you've read in a paper but can't remember which one.

Hi Ali and Alexandre,

Thanks for your kind feed back. In the section 2." Writing a Paper" of my mind map there are some reference management software links like: Mendeley, EndNote, Zotero.

Please let me know if you could find more online reference management such as ReadCube.

Are MATLAB, Mathematica, and Simulink included? I do a lot of computational work and definitely I need these...

Hi Arturo,

Thanks for your contributions. I have added "Task Coach" to my "Online Collaboration Tools" mind map http://www.mindmeister.com/39918845/online-collaboration-tools-2011-nader-ale-ebrahim. The "Texmaker" added to "Research Tools" mind map http://www.mindmeister.com/39583892/research-tools-by-nader-ale-ebrahim.

Thanks Yong,

I have not included any computational software in the "Research Tools" mind map. It is a good idea to open a new Mind Map for putting all computational software.

You can use Zotero in web pages. For example If you click on Zotero save button while you are visiting google scholar, IEEE, Springer, ACM and etc, It will fetch all the paper's information automatically and you can use them every word processor softwares.

Also you can sync your Zotero information from all your devices.

Wow, that's a lot of tools you've gather Nader.. Are all of them free?

Several free tools can be found in the "Research Tools" child nodes. Some paid tools are also included. See more at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2280007 .

Java and CPLEX for finding solutions.

Latex used for writing

Hi Fang, CPLEX with JAVA is and application program.for creating a model, and solving that model, Isn't it? Please provide the link.

In my research work i am using a many tools like co-relation regression , annova, chi-squire, t-test, etc, for analyzing the data which were collected from the field survey...

Thanks Basavaraj for your contribution. Which software do you use for statistical analysis?

An amazing tool in itself!

I would also suggest adding a node for statistical tools. I've used SAS, Matlab and E-Views in my research.

Thanks Yudhvir, I have received many comments on adding a new node for statistical tools. I will do soon.

Thanks Nader!

@ Yon : not all actually

Zotero, mendeley, EndNote. Which is better to use. I have installed Zetero and EndNote but did not get how to use these. Anyone can please help me.

Searching for publications, papers and references:

* http://scholar.google.de/

* http://www.citeulike.org/

References library:

* bibtex + http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ + notepad++

Writing publications:

file_with_bibtex + Docear4Word 1.0 (http://www.docear.org/2012/09/03/docear4word-1-0-managing-citations-bibliographies-and-references-in-microsoft-word-based-on-bibtex/) + Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/home) + MS Word

All files and folders that got correlations with research automatically added to specific dropbox folder.

I really like the visual digram

Thanks Nader for providing this

NVIVO is particularly useful software for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, it helps make sense of interview transcripts and written documents.

SPSS Statistics is a software package quantitative data analysis.

Zotero has be very helpful open source software for referencing.

Great collection of tools, Nader! I'm finding it really useful. Thanks

@ Adaba, thanks for your comment. I do appropriate if you could post a good example of using NVIVO for doing literature review.

@ AlGhamdi, thanks for your feedback. Please introduce some new tools.

@ Dmitriyev, Nice tools. I have added Docear4Word 1.0 (as you recommended) to the "Research Tools" Mind Map. The rest of the tools are existed in the Mind Map http://www.mindmeister.com/39583892/research-tools-by-nader-ale-ebrahim.

@ Singh, Please browse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software for comparing different reference management software. In order to know get how to use the software, please refer to YouTube, there are plenty of relevant training materials.

@ Dhedhi, Thanks for your feedback.

@ Iranmanesh, Thanks for the comment.

Google Scholar, Thomson, Research Gate, Anelis.

@Nader the following references a useful guides to doing literature reviews using NVIVO.

1. Beekhuyzen, J. (2007). Putting the pieces of the puzzle together: using NVIVO for a literature review. In Proceedings of the 4th QUALIT Conference Qualitative Research in IT & IT in Qualitative Research. Wellington, New Zealand.

2. Di Gregorio, S. (2000). Using Nvivo for your literature review. In Proceedings of the Conference on the Strategies in Qualitative Research: Issues and Results from Analysis using QSR NVIVO andNUD* IST (pp. 29–30). Institute of Education, London. http://ww.sdgassociates.com/downloads/literature_review.pdf

@ Dospinescu , How can access to English version of Anelis http://www.anelis.ro/ "NATIONAL ELECTRONIC ACCESS TO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH LITERATURE"?

@ Adaba , Thank you very much. The articles are helpful.

@ Nader: by google translate, you are able to translate it such as:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.anelis.ro%2F

@ Iranmanesh, I did. I am looking for original English version because some pictures remain in Romanian language.

The usual stuff (Zotero, Endnoet etc.). Made a smal tool (see www.bohrresearch.com) that challenges me as well.

I like to use Mendeley in Mac OS and iPad (linked with Dropbox)

@Constantijn I try to use www.bohrresearch.com, but I have not received any feed back. Would you please elaborate about www.bohrresearch.com.

@Vinicius Thanks for sharing your experiance.

I used Citavi (http://www.citavi.com/) to search publication databases, organize literature and manage my thoughts.

@Stephan Thanks, where Shall I put the Citavi? under reference management software node? or a search engine? . It seems, the Citavi is a combination of Microsoft OneNote and Thomson Endnote. By the way, I have added to the "Reference management" node and mentioned “you have recommended”.

I wrote an assignment on all three compared to Endnote, Endnote won hands down ,

I am using Latex, Matlab and Java in my research. Thanks.

Thanks Gary and Geaur for sharing their experiences.

Hello, I am the founder of Docear which is a free and open source literature management software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Docear has a unique concept that helps you organizing, creating and discovering academic literature with a strong focus on the management of PDFs and annotations.

If that sounds interesting to you, have a look at http://www.docear.org/2013/10/17/docear-1-0-stable-a-new-video-new-manual-new-homepage-new-details-page/

And you might also be interested in this article which is discussing some aspects of how to (not) chose a reference manager http://www.docear.org/2013/10/14/what-makes-a-really-really-bad-reference-manager/

@Joeran, I have gone through the Docear website, it is interesting reference management software. I have added Docear to my "Research Tools" Mind Map http://www.mindmeister.com/39583892/research-tools-by-nader-ale-ebrahim in the section 2 under reference management software beside the Citavi, Endnote, JabRef, Mendeley, or Zotero. I will work with Docear and then introduce to my students to use it.

Joeran, very interesting. I`ll try it :)

@Ramona, Thanks. I have added all in my Research Tools mind map under "Survey" and "neural networks software". I do appreciate if you could introduce me more general software which you used for performing the PhD journey better.

@Nader Ale Ebrahim: Thank you!

I am using "R" for statistical computing and graphics and Weka for some of the Data mining tasks

@Nagender, Thanks for your contributions. Would you please elaborate the Weka features for doing for instance literature review?

Nader, this is a very good initiative ! Let me answer your question by categorizing it:

***** PUBLICATION WRITING: LaTex is the best. pdflatex and bibtex work in the Linux environment, and this is the best tool to write papers. However, a few publishers, like IGI Global, prefer the Word format. For formulas, Word is a disaster !!! Using LaTex, it is 100x better. If you have a Windows environment (like I do), use Cygwin (free), which is Linux-in-Windows. Or, I have seen many LateX editors for Windows ...

***** SIMULATIONS and PLOTTING: MATLAB is the de facto standard here. You can plot anything, and have titles looking very professional. MATLAB is not free, so, use GNU OCTAVE, which is about 99% compatible, unless you need certain toolkits, like the Image Processing toolkit ... NOTE : There is a Windows version of GNU OCTAVE, which works great !

***** PROGRAMMING : MATLAB (or, the free version OCTAVE) are perfect for getting something to work, as long as you don't care too much about the speed of program execution. Most of the times, this will be the case. However, when you care about speed, use C, or, use the CODER, which is built-into MATLAB to convert your MATLAB code into C code ...

***** LITERATURE SEARCH: This is the heart of any research. Google is great , but, a lot of the content is not accessible if your institution does not have subscriptions to , say, Elsevier, or IEEE. In this case, you can find the titles from Google, and go to the author's website(s) to download the PDFs. This will be possible in many cases, since authors post the PDFs on their website.

***** PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT : Make sure to let your students know that, it could take FOREVER to get something working. Most students spend 1/2 of their Ph.D. to develop a program. Find open source programs and adapt them ... There is a lot of open source code out there . For example, in the Image Processing world, Open CV. No reason to develop your own code. There is no RESEARCH value in it anyway ...

These are a few thoughts ...

Thanks Tolga, for your comprehensive answer to the question. I be appreciated if you could more elaborate the literature search and literature review process. I am conducting workshops for students who come from different discipline and the common problem they have is using the tools for literature review. I have written an article entitled “Introduction to the Research Tools Mind Map” available through http://ssrn.com/abstract=2280007 . In this article I have listed a series of tools that help researchers in various aspects of literature review and scholarly writing, such tools:

(a) Write and edit: Ginger, Spell Checker, Plagiarisma, Springer Exemplar

(b) Analyse and summarise texts: Smmry, Tools 4 Noobs, Free Summarizer

(c) Search desktop: DtSearch, Copernic Desktop Search

(d) Write collaboratively: Google Drive, Adobe acrobat professional

(e) Synthesise and visualise information: MindMeister, MindMaple, Text2mindmap

(f) Manage bibliographic data: Mendeley, EndNote, Zotero

(g) Build and share article collections: Bibliogo, WizFolio

(h) Detect and avoid plagiarism: Viper, The Plagiarism Checker, Turnitin, Paper Rater

Once more thanks for your valuable contribution.

Nader, as far as I am concerned, every research has three distinct phases: I) Literature search, II) conceptualization, III) development.

In Phase I (Literature search), you are answering the question : is this idea new ? has it been done ? ... Unless you have a clear answer on this, do not bother going to Phase II, since you could be completely wasting your time. The problem with almost every tool is that, it is impossible for automated tools to figure out the RELEVANCE. It is almost always the case that, there is TOO MUCH information, and no way to find out your specific answer ... There are other discussion threads heavily discussing this.

In Phase II, you are certain that, this idea is new, or your implementation is new, so, you go ahead with it. But, before you start developing, you have to conceptualize what tools you are going to use. This is the THINKING BEFORE DEVELOPING stage. Any minute you spend here culd save you 10 minutes in the future. This is where you look at every possible tool, and evaluate them, and ideally read the reviews about them.

Phase III. This is where you start using the tool(s) you selected in Phase II.

@Tolga, Once more thanks for your comprehensive information about the research process.

Dear All, Please check the new "Tools" on the "Research Tools" Mind Map

http://www.mindmeister.com/39583892/research-tools-by-nader-ale-ebrahim .

Used SPSS and MSTATC statistical softwares.

@Manoj, Have you ever used any other tools for thesis writing?

Not yet. But after going trough the replies in this forum, i'll see what else could be used now. Interesting and really useful question, by the way.

@Manoj, Thanks.

Thanks to Mr. Nader Ale Ebrahim for starting this thread. It is very informative. Thanks to all who shared their views.

Hi Hari, Please add your personal experience on any kind of "Research Tools" that you are using for facilitating your research.

@ Nader, frankly i am not using any. After going through this thread, i think i should... thanks any way......

@Hari, Once more thanks.

Dear Nader:

ALWAYS SIMPLE:

1- Thorough study of ALL Biliography

2- Exchange with people worldwide.

Only that,

Fermin

Thanks Fermin De La Fuente-Calvo.

I am using Evernote. Nice tool to copy paste information on a notepad type of app. Supports variety of formats as well and sync on different devices

i have developed a bi-variate extreme value prediction model which was based on application of difference equations. As such no tool was used from the point of view of data analysis. It was more a theoretical work.

Thanks Bishwajit and Netra for sharing.

Just started. Am using Mendeley.

I recently added SimpleMind / MindJet (on Android) tool to by research tools. these tools let u take pics from the camera and store it as a node in the MindMap hierarchy.... also synchronization across devices is also available

@Bishwajit thanks. Please add some extra "Tools" which are used for facilitating your research (from collecting the literature up to promoting your publications).

Thanks @Zeashan, Sure Latex is essential. However, most of the researcher prefer to use Microsoft Word as well. Do you know any other tools for writing a thesis?

In some areas you simply have to use Latex because it allows typesetting mathematical formulae. Of course it has a learning curve but it is really very straightforward.

Thanks @Zeashan Khan and @Joao Moura for their valuable comments.

If you are using Mendeley, you can also use Scholarly to access your articles on an Android tablet.

Thanks @Ravi, that is great.

Will give a try at Mendeley + Scholarly. Thanks.

Recently I tried to find articles of interest, Several of them I could download from the website of mu university library and a few had to purchase. But, a number of interesting articles I could not afford to purchase.

Anyway, I am an old-timer, in those days library books, journals, research cards (to take notes) and reference cards were tools of research.

Internet, of course, facilitates literature search, however, substantial literature available is substandard or directly relevant to the researcher resulting in malpractices and fails the spirit of and meaning of research. Sometimes, diametrically opposite view and results are encountered and for a novice it is hard to distinguish false and true contribution.

using google scholar, google patents,  IEEE, Springer etc

I am using biohunter. It is a single portal which provides literature search, data statistics, reading, sorting, storing, field expert identification and journal finder for your innovative research.

I am using these tools , both of them available in AppStore!

-Paper 3

-Highlights 

enjoy ;)

I am using Biohunter for literature search and full-text download. This tool provides more information than a literature search.

www.biohunter.in

Microsoft referencing tool can also be use

Mendeley, Nvivo, Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office OneNote

Readwise, Notion, Pocket, Evernote, hypothes.is

This Twitter thread lists hundreds of useful tools. I hope it helps

https://twitter.com/Sajeerp_/status/1487743490431721474?t=-oBNmhGZyIxmIYAKVNd_kw&s=19