Tuesday Tech Tools: 21 Research Tools

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Some tools that will help you with research.

Academic OneFile
This Cengage database, often available through public libraries, has access to thousands of journals. Not all articles are available in full text. Subscription required.

Academic Search Premier*
This database provides access to the latest research published in thousands of scholarly journals. Subscription required.

The Brookings Institution
A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars that produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics.

Comparea
See a visual comparison of two states, cities, countries or continents. Move them around.  It will also tell how many times bigger a geographic area is to another.

Connected Papers
A visual literature-mapping and recommendation tool that finds publicly available scholarly papers. Around 200 million articles, including preprints. The articlle alert system builds a list of recommended papers that users can train by liking or disliking the articles.

Contact Out
A plugin that surfaces email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. Free plan allows 100 search credits. Paid plans starting from $19 a month.

Content Gems
Monitors blogs, social media, etc and filters the content based on keywords, etc. and sends you links. A free account is available but limited. Paid accounts (starting at $10) are based on the number of keywords you want to research. another.

Data.gov
US government data sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals
A growing database that covers only journals that are free and open to the public.

Directory of Open Access Repositories
This free site is operated by the University of Nottingham in the UK. It aggregates databases from around the world, locating open access research across disciplines.

Fact Check
A political fact checking site run by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Feedly
Web-based and largest RSS feed. Subscribe to get new posts from a site. Uses upvotes and downvotes to learn which new articles is most relevant to the user. Useful to academic researchers looking to stay on top of new papers but also for those who want to monitor news, RSS feeds, Reddit, Twitter and podcasts. Free, but a paid account offers more features such as the ability to follow more than 100 sources and hide adverts. $6 or more a month. Compare to Inoreader.

Fetching
Captures every site you visit automatically, so you can more easily find websites and articles you need now but didn't know at the time you would need them.

Google Scholar*
The dominant tool in the field of research, users can set alerts for publication of new scholarly papers on particular research topics, authors, or keywords. Sometimes picks up useful preprints, theses, and dissertations. Access to the studies could be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Widely acknowledged as the biggest corpus in existence, one estimate puts the volume at close to 400 million articles.

Google Trends
Real time search info. Break it down by day or region. Pulls data from YouTube and Google News as well. Insights on what people want to know right now.

Hunter
Searches for contact information by employer. 100 searches free. Paid plans range from $49 – $399.

Open Knowledge Map
A visual-mapping tool that creates maps based on keywords to arrange 100s of scholarly papers, data sets, and software that are related into bubbles. Users can change and update them. It can group papers into themes you may not have considered to find subfields of research.

Research Rabbit
Launched in 2021, it describes itself as “Spotify for papers”. Users save relevant papers to a collection. A list of recommended articles updates based on the collection. Alerts are more personalized than Google Scholar. Free.

Research Gate
Sends email recommendations of scholarly papers and offers a feed of them. Users can also see a chronological newsfeed of papers posted by their ResearchGate contacts. Around 150 million publication pages and 20 million users. Free.

TLDR
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers.

Storyful
Find and verifies stories on social media platforms for clients. Owned by News Corps.

More tech tools

Knowing the Why

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Viktor Frankl worked as a therapist in the Nazi concentration camps, and in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Communication Upward 

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Middle- and upper-level executive should recognize that they are dependent on information that has been filtered, analyzed, abstracted, sorted and condensed by other segments of the organization. It is hard for them to stay in touch with unprocessed reality. Every official must periodically step outside the executive cocoon and experience the basic realities that the system is presumably designed to deal with. 

Every organization has its front-line activities— selling, fighting, healing, teaching— and its bureaucratic or executive-level activities. Both are important, but the frontline activities take place far from the executive’s swivel chair. The front-line people who wrestle with action problems every day know a lot more than anyone ever asked them.

The layers of middle and upper management can be a formidable filter against creative ideas generated below; and there have been many attempts to create alternative opportunities for communication upward, such as the suggestion box and the inspector general.But there is probably no substitute for creating a culture— a set of attitudes, customs and habits throughout the organization— that favors easy two-way communication, in and out of channels, among all layers of the organization. Two key messages should be implicit in such a culture: 1. “You will know what's going on, and 2. “Your voice will be heard.”

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Data Science articles from August 2021

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Bias in the Judicial System

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When it comes to bail, for instance, you might hope the judges were able to look at the whole case together, carefully balancing all the pros and cons before coming to a decision. But unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise. Instead, psychologists have shown that judges are doing nothing more strategic than going through an ordered checklist of warning flags in their heads. If any of those flags — past convictions, community ties, prosecution's request — are raised by the defendant story, the judge will stop and deny bail. 

The problem is that so many of those flags are correlated with race, gender and educational level. Judges can’t help relying on intuition more than they should; and in doing so, they are unwittingly perpetuating biases in the system. 

Hannah Fry, Hello World

The advantage of thinking like a child

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Great strategists. respond to the moment, like children. Their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past – the present is much too interesting. 

The Greek thinker Aristotle thought that life was defined by movement. What does not move is dead. What has speed and mobility has more possibilities, more life. You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasure, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed. Whenever you find your thought revolving around a particular subject or idea – an obsession, resentment - force them past it. Distract yourself with something else. Like a child, find something new to be absorbed by, something worthy of concentrated attention. Do not waste time on things you cannot change or influence. Just keep moving. 

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

Seeing Music

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When Julie Landsman auditioned for the role of principal French horn at the Metropolitan Opera of New York (Met for short), the screens had just gone up in the practice hail. At the time, there were no women in the brass section of the orchestra, because everyone “knew” that women could not play the horn as well as men. But Landsman came and sat down and played—and she played well.

But when they declared her the winner and she stepped out from behind the screen, there was a gasp. It wasn’t just that she was a woman, and female horn players were rare.. And it wasn’t just that bold, extended high C, which was the kind of macho sound that they expected from a man only. It was because they knew her. Landsman had played for the Met before as a substitute. Until they listened to her with just their ears, however, they had no idea she was so good.

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

The miracle question

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Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

Tuesday Tech Tools: 17 Editing tools

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Looking for some tools (apps and online) that will help you with editing your writing (or the writing of others)? Here are some useful options. The tech tools site also has a list of links to writing helps for better organization, academic papers, and putting together scripts. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

1Checker
Mac app that checks your grammar and spelling. Free.

After the Deadline*
Checks your story for grammar, spelling and style. Works as a plugin for WordPress blogs, an add-on for the Firefox browser, etc.

AutoCrit
Scans your writing and highlights flaws such as repetitive words, overuse of adverbs and use of passive voice. $30 a month.

Expresso*
An app that analyzes your writing, breaking down everything from which words you are using frequently to the number of times parts of speech come up in your writing. See what percentage of sentences are extra-long and which words are filler and which verbs are weak. Free.

Ginger
Writing tool that works as grammar checker, sentence rephraser, translator, dictionary and text reader. Free.

Grammarly*
Automated proofreader and personal grammar coach. Free version though the premium option has more features ($29.95).

Hemingway App
The Hemingway app is designed to make you a better writer by highlighting problems in your writing. Goal is to make more direct and active--more Hemingway-ey, as the Washington Post proclaims. Just paste your text into the app and it will highlight hard to read sentences, adverbs, complex phrases, and passive voice.  Color coordinated highlighting. Click on these words to see the suggested alternatives.  Word count, readability grade, etc.  $6.99.

Marked 2
Tools for writers including word counts, document stats, highlights repeated words.  Mac only.  $9.99.

oDesk
Hire an experienced proofreader based on an hourly rate (typically one hour for every 5000 words).

PaperRater
Grammar, plagiarism, and spell checker. Mostly free but $7.50 per month for all features.

Proofread Bot
Shows your mistakes and what areas of your writing that could be strengthened. The more words reviewed, the greater the cost starting at $5 for 20,000 words.  

Readability Score
Cut and paste your text into a dialogue box to see the writing's grade level. Free, but for any contribution you get access to more advanced tools like readability alerts, PDF and Word doc processing and bulk uploads. TextEvaluator offers more feedback on the text.

Slickwrite
Writing app that checks grammar along with flow, structure, word frequency, and overused phrases.

TextEvaluator
Like Readability Score, it will tell you what grade level a piece of text is written on, the average length of sentences, etc.  But TextEvaluator goes further, including grammatical complexity, insights on vocabulary, etc.

Word Counter
Cut and paste your document (or just type) to see how many words, characters, and sentences you are using. It shows what words are overused, the average number of words in your sentences, and the reading level you are writing at. Free.

Word Frequency Counter
See how often you use (and overuse) words and phrases in your writing.

Writefull
Checks your text against a huge database of correct language. Use it to find language you might not have considered. A desktop app that works with emails, Word docs, etc. Free.

Seeing Victory

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A plank 12” wide laying on the floor would be easy to walk. Place the same plank between two ten story buildings and “walk the plank” is a different matter. You “see” yourself easily and safely walking the plank on the floor. You “see” yourself falling from the plank stretched between the buildings. Since the mind completes the picture you paint in it, your fears are quite real. Many times a golfer will knock a ball in the lake or hit it out of bounds and then stop back with the comment, “I know I was going to do that.” His mind painted a picture and his body completed the action. On the positive, side, the successful gofer knows that he must ‘see’ the ball going into the cup before he strokes it. A hitter in baseball sees the ball dropping in for a base hit before he swings at the ball, and the successful salesman sees the customer buying before he makes the calls. Michelangelo clearly saw the Mighty Moses in that block of marble before he struck the first blow.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top