Websites that aid in research

Completing a research project involves extensive data, analysis and statistics. Offline methods, including field visits, focused group discussions, surveys and visits to the central library, are still the best methods to gather information. However, collaboration with fellow researchers across the globe to understand perspectives is what today's researchers look for. The online medium comes to the rescue at this juncture. Here's a range of websites, catering to the global research community in organising, sharing and collaborating with peers.

Google Scholar
It provides a mechanism to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one location, an individual can search across many disciplines and sources - articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other websites.

Google Scholar Citations also provides a system for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. One can check who is citing their publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. It helps authors quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarises recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research. One can also explore publications in research areas of interest. While abstracts are freely available for most of the articles, reading the entire article may require a subscription.

Mendeley
This website helps crowd-source research catalog with millions of papers. It has a reference manager and helps generate citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and other softwares. One can also import and organise PDFs on personal computers. Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help one organise their research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

It helps researchers to connect with peers and share papers, and provides the facility to share and access papers via iPhone or iPad. While most facilities are available for Windows, Linux and Mac, a web storage space of 1 GB is offered free-of-cost to users.

Academicians can create private groups to share reading assignments and provide insights. One can create a researcher profile to enable others to read and cite their work. One can also submit a dissertation for review with all advisors, wherein advisors can annotate the draft, and one can respond in real-time. Lawrence D'Souza, a 27-year-old psychology researcher said one of the biggest advantages of Mendeley was its storage capacity and the insights provided by external reviewers to their work.

Academia.edu
Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. M Aditya, a US-based PhD student, said the platform was a social networking site for researchers, who could freely discuss latest developments in their fields with other peers online. The platform has 2.47 million academicians, adding 1.65 million papers and 720,239 research interests.

Analytics is also used to track the popularity of a research on the platform by assigning ranks to it. Further, PhD students can view journals through their account.

arXiv.org
arXiv.org is a highly-automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles. The covered areas include physics, mathematics, computer science, non-linear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics. It is maintained and operated by the Cornell University Library with guidance from arXiv Scientific Advisory Board and the arXiv Sustainability Advisory Group, and with the help of subject moderators. Users can retrieve papers from arXiv via the web interface. Registered authors may use the web interface to submit their articles to arXiv.

CiteSeerX
CiteSeerx is an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. It aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeerx attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries. CiteSeerx has developed new methods and algorithms to index PostScript and PDF research articles on the web.

Knimbus
This global search and collaboration platform connects creators and users of scientific, technical and medical knowledge to online content and peer groups. This technology platform offers researchers/users a single window for real-time search across millions of articles, books, patents; facility to share articles, tags and the opportunity to create shared projects and build profiles and peer networks.

When an individual from an institute registers on the platform, he is offered two types of content. One is the free content from open sources and the other is commercial or subscribed content. Based on the commercial content, which is subscribed by the university/institute the individual belongs to, the results show up accordingly. The platform is customised for each institution, so that users are able to access content sources subscribed by the institutions.

The platform offers features like one-stop research hub, where users can access and discover trusted and credible information through institutionalised libraries, subscribed resources and other web and open source content. Collaboration with their colleagues and other researchers to build collective intelligence and insight is also possible through the portal.

Further researchers can use the platform to tag information and comment on peer information.

USER SPEAK

• Aditya Pandey, a 26-year-old researcher from Bihar, termed these platforms as an inevitable research tool. "Portals like Google Scholar are useful to review peers' articles in the particular field of research and offer updated information, often difficult to find offline," he said.
• Mumbai-based cell-stem researcher Abhik Chatterjee, however, cautioned one should be careful while viewing peer research online. "Only credible and well-known platform should be visited, otherwise prospective students can be misguided," he said.
• While storage and viewing research up to a certain limit (maximum 1GB) is free, users have to pay for storing and viewing additional research.