From the collection of data for research to its publication, there are many parts involved in creating a research paper. Because of this, doing research isn’t a simple task. Getting your research work published is more than just creating content.

Thankfully, there are many available tools that researchers can use in building their research. Check out the following:

Writing Software

Writing your research paper calls for many steps, including adding images, tables, or scientific equations. You may also need to include footnotes and cite references. Sometimes, you may need to use a word counter for a specific word requirement. Now, choosing the best writing software depends on your personal choice.

While there are many researchers who are content with open-access software, such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice, some are willing to spend a few bucks to use Microsoft Office Word. For the scientific community, however, Latex is a popular choice.

In a research paper, it’s ideal to ensure that your document is free from grammatical errors, typos, and wrong sentence structure. Even if your content is good, if it contains bad grammar, it can still be judged wrongly. Thus, using a writing software that also has a grammar checker would be truly helpful to improve your text.

Research Software

You need tools and software when doing research. In laying the groundwork for your investigation, a free tool to help you is Google Scholar. With this tool, you can easily look for works that are similar to yours and find out how their research can help you.

If your work involves analyzing data, you’ll also need to have the appropriate software. A common tool to help you perform basic graphing and statistical analysis is Microsoft Excel. Depending on your area of research, you may need to have other data analysis tools to improve your work.

Reference Tools

In organizing the references you’ve used in your paper, you need handy referencing tools. These tools come by different names, including citation app or software, reference management software, citation manager, or literature management software. All of these means a tool that’ll let you save and format your references.

It’s crucial to select a software that will let you consistently save the references that you used in your writeup. There are various options out there including Paperpile, Mendeley, and Zotero. These free resources allow you to collect the references you read and save them later for easy access.

Project Management Software

Working on a research manuscript involves deadlines and multiple tasks. With everything that needs to be done on time, it’s easy to get caught up and be overwhelmed. Thus, it’s a good idea to find a project management software that will help keep you on top of your work. With such a tool, you can easily lay out the activities that need to be done by whom and when. For many researchers, it’s helpful to visualize all tasks and know the expected timeline for doing them.

There are a bunch of options available to all kinds of researchers. Some of these include Scrivener, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft OneNote. Using these tools, you can save tables, images, lab results while you do your research, too.

Formatting Tools

Today, there are lots of journals with their own guidelines and formatting rules. Take note that publishers come with a specific style guide. If you want to publish your paper with them, it’s important that you follow their specified format. 

You can start with templates provided by Google Docs or Microsoft Office Word. However, if you want your work to automatically follow a specific format, you can try Typeset or Overleaf, which are free tools.

Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism happens when you use text from someone else’s work without citing the original author, which is a serious academic misconduct. Regardless of using it word for word or paraphrasing it, it’s still considered plagiarism if you don’t give credit to the rightful person. 

A common way to plagiarize academic work is using your previously published work without stating that it was already used. This is called self-plagiarism. When you publish your work, the publisher also holds the copyright of your text and you’d need to ask permission to use it or you can also mention the source.

There are various plagiarism checking software you can choose from. This will ensure that you only submit work that’s free from plagiarism. 

Some of this software includes DupliChecker and Turnitin.

Final Thoughts

Writing and publishing research work isn’t an easy thing to do. With the many steps to undergo, you’d need some tools to help manage the tasks until its completion. 

While there are only a few of these tools mentioned above, you’re free to explore other software and tools, which can help you finish your work and finally have it published.