An almost regular collection of useful links for students, academics and other creative nerds.
This week: Easy referencing, mind mapping, and data sets
Citationsy
Citationsy was built when the author discovered Chegg had bought the app formerly known as RefME and ruined it. Referencing software can be complicated to the point of stupidity sometimes. 1 Citationsy offers sharp relief for anyone wanting a cleaner, more simple tool for managing references and creating bibliographies. The backend is a web app with client apps for both iOS and macOS. Not only does it bring back the incredibly useful barcode scanner, it’s also completely free to use.
Formatically — Format Your Entire Paper Online
Another online tool, but at the other end of the scale. Trust me when I say you don’t need the expensive options being advertised here. Then again, I know plenty of students who would like the idea of having their papers formatted for them for a whole year. It’s your money. Oh, and they have some free tools too.
Outline Insight by WriteMapper
Curated examples from WriteMapper of writers using outlining. WriteMapper was released last year, and is developing rapidly into something very promising. I have a more detailed review in the pipe, but briefly it works like a kind of hybrid mind map and outline editor. It has a slick interface that combines visual mapping with focused text editing. With an obvious point of difference, Writemapper is shaping as a serious alternative to more established mind mapping tools
Academic Torrents
Don’t be fooled by the technology. It really is interesting to see P2P tech anywhere in the academic world. The mere mention of torrents makes big academic publishers have conniptions. It’s no joke, there have been severe cases of this. And yet, it makes complete sense to share large data sets this way. Browsing the available data is interesting in itself, last time I looked the Pwned Passwords was the most popular data set.
Paperkast
An online forum for discussing academic papers. These things are always dominated by scientific articles. It’s new, so get in before the trolls discover it.
Something Completely Different
Itty Bitty Site
This has been doing the rounds lately, but maybe you missed it. I’m still getting my head around it to be honest. It’s a clever bit of code that compresses an entire single page site into a serverless URL. Got that? This is how it works, pretty cool huh.
- Endnote ↩
Photo by mauRÍCIO santos on Unsplash