Resources and tools for research

Find further resources to build your research skills and career with our services

Whether you’re at undergrad, masters or PhD, our services can help you have more impact with your research

 

 

Resources and tools for research

Resources for developing your research skills

Pre-registration

 

Doing reproducible and ethical science

General advice for writing research papers


Advice on writing a literature review

Tools to help with the research process

  • Elicit is a GPT-3 powered research assistant that helps with various tasks, including classifying datasets and finding researchers similar to a list you started with, which may be helpful if you’re looking for a supervisor. Students automatically receive access as part of our coaching process.
  • SMMRY automatically summarises text to save you time.
  • The Brain allows you to organise ideas in non-linear mind maps. We think it’s the best mind-map tool and may be particularly useful during creative research phases and when working in open/new research fields.
  • RoamResearch and Obsidian are note-taking tools which present networks of connected notes in graph form.
  • Notion and Workflowy are project management and note-taking apps. The Notion personal plan is free with an academic email address.

General

Development economics

Social sciences

Statistical data

  • Elicit allows you to enter a question and receive answers from research papers.
  • Connected Papers creates a visual overview of your field of study, showing papers that are similar to the paper you started with.
  • Semantic Scholar is a literature search tool that provides one-sentence summaries of papers and shows papers that influenced or were influenced by the paper you are reading.
  • Scite shows the contexts in which a scientific article has been cited and whether the citations were accompanied by supporting or contrasting evidence.
  • LitMaps creates visual maps of citations between research papers and recommends relevant papers.
  • ResearchRabbit helps you search for papers and authors, monitor new literature and visualise research landscapes.

Collections of resources

Recruiting Participants

Building a Study

Tools for building online experiments and behaviour change programs:

Funding and sharing your research

  • See our funding database for PhD funding related to our recommended research directions (some of these opportunities may also be relevant to undergraduate and masters students).
  • Sign up to our opportunities newsletter to hear about funding opportunities related to your research interests.
  • Many universities have their own university- or faculty/school-based mini-grants programs to support students with particularly promising research or extra-curricular plans (e.g. exceptional research proposals for their undergraduate, masters or PhD thesis or plans to attend conferences or research-based events to support their research). Try googling something like “special research grants [name of your university]” to find whether yours offers this.
  • The 2021 scholarship guide outlines scholarships available in various universities across multiple countries for undergraduate, masters and PhD students.
  • This site features Effective Altruism funding opportunities for a number of different cause areas and disciplines and see this post for additional opportunities.

A small number of the many thesis awards you could apply to are below. Your own department/university likely run their own thesis awards as well. Consider applying – it is usually a good way to show that your thesis is exceptional.

International, all disciplines

International, discipline-specific

Germany

UK


Where to publish your paper (both sites provide recommendations based on your abstract):

See our advice on sharing your finished thesis or dissertation for more ideas.

Next steps

If you want to find out about research-related opportunities relevant (particularly those relevant to the research directions we recommend), consider:

  • Signing up to our Opportunities newsletter, which features opportunities particularly suited to students interested in research careers and early-career researchers.
  • Exploring our research direction profiles for featured opportunities and signing up for the newsletters we list in the profiles. up for the newsletters we include in our profiles.
  • Exploring the newsletters linked in this post.

Some further potential sources of opportunities are:

If you’re interested in a long-term research career, some resources that might help are:

Want to suggest resources or tools that could be added to this page? Help us improve this collection by reaching out or suggest edits on this google doc.

This page was lasted updated 13/04/23. Thanks to Michel Justen for contributions to this page.

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