A curated list of carefully selected tools and resources I wish I knew when starting my PhD. All of these tools make your life SO MUCH easier and are both for early career as well as more senior researchers (or even if you are not in academia, for that matter). The original Twitter thread where I started this list can be found here.
This repository is aimed to be a living, constantly developing resource where everybody can contribute with new resources! If you want to contribute, please read the contribution guidelines here first, then send a pull request or contact me on Twitter in case of any questions.
- awesome-phd by Alireza Samar.
- Doctoral Student Cheat Sheet by Justin Harty.
- Resources for Postdocs by Lei Zhang.
- PhD Resources by Guillaume Dalle
Sorted alphabetically into sub-categories.
- METAFOR: Use the metafor package in R for your meta-analyses.
- R CHEATSHEETS: There are loads of cheat sheets to help you find your way around in R.
- STATCHECK: To check a PDF, DOCX or HTML file for errors in statistical reporting, upload it to Statcheck. Some journals even officially request this now (e.g., Psychological Science).
- CITATION DIVERSITY STATEMENT: To increase awareness about citation bias and mitigate it, by checking for and transparently reporting proportions of citing male and female first and last authors, use the citation diversity statement by Zurn et al. (2020, TICS).
- CREDIT AUTHOR STATEMENT: Use the CRedit Author Statement by Brandt et al. (2015, Learned Publishing) to report each author’s proper contribution to a manuscript.
- TENZING: Use the Tenzing ShinyApp for quickly and easily documenting contributorship.
- SAMPLE SIZE JUSTIFICATION. If you need help justifying your sample size, use this Shiny app from Daniel Lakens.
- KAPODI STIMULI DATABASE. A huge database of every emotional stimuli you can think of and may want to use in your experiments.
- OPEN RESEARCH CALENDAR: Keep up with all events related to open scholarship with this handy calendar. You can also follow them on Twitter here.
- RIOT SCIENCE CLUB: The RIOT Science Club is organizing amazing events related to open scholarship. Also visit their Youtube channel for all the recorded talks.
- REPRODUCIBILITEA: Want to discuss the latest papers related to open scholarship? Have a look whether there already is a Reproducibilitea journal club at your institution, and if not, create one of your own!
- CODA: Use Coda, a machine-readable history of cooperation research, to search, select and visualize studies for on-demand meta-analysis.
- CONNECTED PAPERS: To explore connections between published papers (e.g., for a literature review), use Connected Papers. This is also nice to see the reach of your own research! It is a "unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work".
- LITERATURE EXCEL SHEET: No literature review will ever be the same again, if you use this tutorial to organize all your literature in Excel.
- LITERATURE TRACKER: Have a look at this useful tutorial to keep your literature organized.
- LITMAPS: An all-rounder tool for visual research navigation, citation network search, and team synchronization.
- RESEARCH RABBIT: Use Research Rabbit to find both germinal and future works from a single (or multiple) works.
- SCHOLARCY: Want an AI to summarize literature for you? Wait no more, Scholarcy comes to the rescue.
- COLOR CONVERTER: If you need to find out the code for a certain color, check this handy converter.
- DATA HORROR ESCAPE ROOM: Solve cool puzzles together and learn more about all the horrors data has to offer.
- OPEN SCIENCE ESCAPE ROOM: Want to playfully learn about open science? Check out this fun online escape room.
- SEMANTIC SCALE NETWORK: If you want to create a new scale but are not sure whether it exists already, check the Semantic Scale Network to detect semantically related (psychological) scales. You can also add your own scales in there to extend the database.
- 3D BRAIN: Do you have an anatomical scan of your brain and access to a 3D-printer? Follow this easy tutorial to print your own brain.
- DICOMTAGS: Do you want to know where a specific information is saved in the DICOM file of your imaging data. Check out DICOM Tags.
- EDUCORTEX: This handy educational, browser-based visualization tool allows you to enter any functional or anatomical term and visualize the parts of the brain that are most associated with that term. Check the GitHub repository or corresponding paper.
- FMRI COURSE: Learn how to design and analyze fMRI experiments in this free course.
- NEUROQUERY: NeuroQuery is a tool for meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies, relating text queries to activations as well as associations between terms used together in neuroimaging publications. More info in the corresponding paper.
- NEUROSYNTH: NeuroSynth is for large-scale, automated synthesis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. You can search for word associations and papers with specific MNI coordinates.
- TWITTER FOR SCIENTISTS: A handy guide on how to start off on Twitter if you're a scientist.
- WOWCHEMY WEBSITE: If you want to create your own website, but have no clue where to start, check out Daniel Quintana's extremely easy tutorial! Also have a look at my website for an example.
- NOTION: I've said it before and I'll say it again - Notion is the best application there is to keep all your (PhD) note-taking mess in one place. If you want to save Tweets and Threads automatically to Notion, use this tutorial.
- TRELLO: Trello helps you stay organized and work together with others by letting you create lists about anything you want.
- ACROSS THE AGES: An English podcast delving "into the history of a chosen subject, spanning from way back when, all the way up to some time ago".
- BRAINFLICKS: A German podcast about psychology in movies.
- DEAR GRAD STUDENT: An English podcast "to celebrate, commiserate, and support one another through grad school".
- EVERYTHING HERTZ: An English podcast about methodology and scientific life.
- HONEST ACADEMIA: An English podcast from two grad students discussing navigating academia.
- PLANTHROPOLOGY: An English podcast "about humans who love plants & why you should love plants too".
- SCIENCE SHEROES: A German podcast about women and non-binary people in science.
- 10 WAYS TO FIND OPEN ACCESS ARTICLES, curated by Aleksandra Lazic.
- EDITOR: Have a look at this Twitter thread by Michael Breakspear on his experience as a scientific editor.
- JOURNAL-AUTHOR-NAME-ESTIMATOR: If you don’t know who to suggest as a reviewer or what journal to submit your paper to, check out JANE.
- JOURNAL RATER: If you want to know about the review process and manuscript handling, check out the Journal Rater by PhD Voice. Because “life’s too short to put up with reviewer 2’s”.
- ORCID: Get an ORCID - an "Open Researcher and Contributor ID" which is a persistent digital identifier that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. Link your projects and output to your ORCID.
- PUBLONS: Use Publons to keep up with all your peer-reviews and publications - it can also be linked to your ORCID.
- SCIREV: If you want to know how long the review process for a specific journal is, or people's experience with publishing there, check SciRev.
- SHERPA ROMEO: If you are not sure whether you are allowed to upload a preprint prior to journal submission.
- UNPAYWALL: As an alternative to SciHub, consider Unpaywall.
- CITING R PACKAGES: Here} and here are some handy tutorials on how to cite all your used R packages in an RMarkdown document at once. If you want to generate R package citations, look here.
- GRATEFUL: Use the grateful package in R to automatically create a reference list for all your used R packages.
- RECITEWORKS: To check your in-text citations and reference lists for errors, use Reciteworks.
- REFERENCE MANAGEMENT COMPARISON: If you are not sure which reference manager to use, check this handy comparison of all the different ones available and whether they will work on your operating system.
- AUTODRAW: AutoDraw magically makes your doodles into nicer graphics by suggesting shapes based on what you drew.
- CANVA: Canva is amazing for creating content such as slides, figures and there are so many great (and free!) designs to choose from.
- FLATICON: Flaticon has a huge amount of free stickers and icons, ready to download and use.
- FONT AWESOME: Font Awesome has loads of free icons to choose from to use in presentations, posters, etc.
- GANTTRIFY: Check out this handy tool to create Gantt charts in R.
- MIRO: You can use Miro for creating visual presentations of anything, and most of all, for collaboration with others! The possibilities are endless.
- R VISUALIZATION: This is a great syllabus about visualizing data in R, held by Claus Wilke.
- ACRONYMIFY: If you need a cool and catchy acronym for your paper, project, etc. check out Acronymify.
- APA-STYLE WORD DOCUMENT: Thanks to Nicolás F. Narvaez Linares for telling me about the readymade APA-style word document option, where you can directly initialize the right formatting in Word.
- PAPAJA: If you want to create reproducible manuscripts including tables directly from your data in R, use the papaja package.
- PREPRINT TEMPLATES: Amazing and useful "Word templates for typesetting preprints. Because your preprint should be a #prettypreprint" and we don't have time for endless formatting.
- QUILLBOT: Paraphrase like the awesome boss you are using QuillBot.
- The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.
- A Survival Guide to a PhD
- Why Am I in Graduate School?
- Do You Need a PhD?
- So, You Want to Go to Grad School?
- Reasons to Pursue a Ph.D.
- Notes on the PhD Degree
- The Life of an Academic, Explained
- How Science Really Works
- What My PhD Was Like
- 10 Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D.
- Advice for Students and Junior Researchers
- Choosing the Right Grad School
- Deciding to Apply
- Some Notes on Picking Grad Schools/Advisors
- FAQ: Applying to Graduate School for Computer Science
- Realistic Expectations Keep You on the Path to a PhD
- Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students
- Advice for New Ph.D. Students
- A Collection of Advices for Authoring a PhD or Academic Book
- I Graduated From Harvard and MIT — Here's the Smartest Thing I Did on My Applications
- So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!