Tools

Drawings can be sent to Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop on a desktop computer, where work can be continued. An Adobe ID is required. Tutorials and additional information are scattered across various web pages and the app thus requires learning by doing.

Adobe illustrator facilitates the creation of logos, drawings, typography, illustrations and, of course, figures for papers as well as group webpages and other applications. Because illustrator artwork is vector based, it can scale up and down easily for different sized screens and thus is valuable for material published on the web. It is possible to create freehand drawings as well as recolor imported photos (rendering the additional use of Photoshop unnecessary for figures). Furthermore, it is possible to import graphs from other programs, such as excel, and edit the colors, font size, and labels as appropriate for making more visually pleasing figures. When writing a paper, if one of the co-writers wants to match colors from old papers, it is possible to import the old figures, register the color, and then match all future figures for consistency.

Altmetric data can be accessed on a publication's website via a bookmarklet. The aggregated data is displayed as a colored donut with a number. The number is a weighed sum of different outlets and prevalence of a color indicates a dominating medium wherein the publication was mentioned. Altmetric uses policy documents, news, blogs, social media, academic networks and other sources. Links to the individual sources are provided upon clicking the donut. With your ETHZ email address you can get acces to browse and analyze the publications in the ETH Research Collection.

The free, open-source distribution let's you run different development enviroments (JupyterLab, JupyerNotebook, Qt Console, Spyder, Glueviz, Orange, RStudio and VS Code) with exact control of the language and package version. Ideal for scientific computing (data science, machine learning applications, large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, etc.). Anaconda is very beginner-friendly, but comes at the price of great memory requirement.

In Autodesk Sketchbook, sketching is at the heart of the creative process. Sketchbook comes with many powerful tools for sketching. Autodesk is market leader for CAD software, particularly for architects. Tutorials and more information are scattered across various web pages and the app thus requires learning by doing.

It indexes and searches not only journals, but also many university repositories and thus works such as dissertations.

The original list was removed by its creator, however, a copy remains accessible.

Predatory publishers provide limited publishing services while pretending a much higher standard and reputation than they actually have. When publishing in a journal for the first time, ask yourself:

• Is the journal or publisher listed in Beall’s List?
• If claiming to be an open access journal, is the journal in the DOAJ?
• Is the publisher a member of recognized professional organizations?
• Is the journal truly indexed?
• Is the journal transparent and following best practices in editorial and peer review processes, governance, ownership and COPE guidelines?

Information on why Beall's original list disappeared can be found in the web or here.

Browzine is a digital bookshelf, in which one can organise, download and read journals avaialbe via ETH library. New articles and issues are automatically flagged, so one does not lose track. Articles can be saved and read offline at a later point in time.

This free resource can be used to quickly and easily look up or confirm past and present publication titles and abbreviations, as well as CODEN, ISBN, or ISSN codes. The CASSI database contains a listing of publications indexed by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) since 1907.

In Citavi you can process your collected pdfs with highlighter and comments, and tagging with keywords can help to retrieve your information at a later point. A remarkable feature is the Knowledger Organizer, which facilitates working with ideas, corresponding text snippets and their references. Supports MS Word and various TeX editors. There is currently no site licence at ETHZ.

The international language corpora portal (in English) allows you to look up words in 250 different languages

Offers for search capabilites beyond what is possible by using the web interface. Ideal for large scale projects.

Accessible via Python.

DeepL translates texts quickly and precisely, using an unspecified neuronal networks approach. If you click on a word in the translated text, other words and phrases are suggested. More than 20 European languages are supported, including German, English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Polish. There are also Chinese and Japanese.

The Pro version of Deepl can be licensed via the IT-Shop of ETH. This way there is no character limit anymore and you have a higher limit for the number of whole documents that can be translated.

You can search by keyword and filter by publisher, year or even subject.

There is also information about article processing fees (APCs) and the Creative Commons licenses used.

You can create polls e.g. giving a list of possible dates for a meeting and distribute them via link. You can opt to get email updates for every person that has just completed the poll. The currently most popular choices are nicely highlighted in real-time and the final result can be exported as an excel file.

Doodle offers possibilities to connect to Outlook, Google Calendar and iCal. Login via SSO and ETHZ-email. This means that new appointments entered in your calendar are automatically indicated as blocked in the appointment polls.

The cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle can be printed or saved.

The Electronic Journals Library University of Regensburg provides a comprehensive catalogue of journals including publication history and more info. It even lists journals that have long since ceased to exist or are now published under another name.

Learn about a broad variety of topics such as writing grant applications, research data management, manuscript preparation, writing skills, technical or book writing, scientific publishing, ethics, finding the right journal, fundamentals of peer-review, social impact of science and ensuring visibility.

In EndNote you can process your collected pdfs with Highlighter and Notes, and tagging with keywords can help to retrieve your information at a later point. Endnote databases, attached files and annotations can be synchronized across many devices. Supports MS Word, OpenOffice and BibTeX (via export). Can connect to databases like PubMed and Web of Science.

Many valuable features are restricted in the free online-only version EndNote basic. EndNote can be licensed via the ETH IT-Shop. ETH library regularly offers hands-on training sessions.

Items and sources can be searched, organized, read or marked as "read later". Connections to other tools like Evernote, OneNote, Trello or Slack are available.

CrossRef is an international association of scholarly publishers that develops shared infrastructure to support more effective scholarly communications. The network covers over 60 million journal articles and other content items (books chapters, data, theses, technical reports) from thousands of scholarly and professional publishers around the globe. CrossRef currently provides a number of ways to locate a DOI: If you have bibliographic data for an item and would like to find the DOI, please use "Bibliographic metadata search". If you only have an article title and author, please use the "article title" search section of this form. If you have the text of a bibliographic reference, please use "Simple Text Query".

Compressed Knowledge: The best of knowledge in concise summaries that include all basic facts and statements of the latest, sharpest and most relevant books. The summaries are mainly available in English and German.

Git is currently the most popular version control system for tracking changes and collaborative editing of source code. While Git is primarily used by software developers, it is becoming more and more popular in the scientific community as well. In fact, Git can be used to track changes to any piece of digital information. GitLab is a web-

If one has created a good search query, this is carried out continuously and automatically again and again. So you can easily stay up to date.

The books are either out of copyright or have been scanned in collaboration with major libraries. With a glance, you can see where and how often your search terms appear in the book. If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you are free to download a PDF copy. If you find a book you like, click on the "Buy this book" and "Borrow this book" links to see where you can buy or borrow the print book, like e.g. in the Info Center.

Very helpful is the filter for usage rights, because with it you can specifically find images that you can use freely. In addition to the keyword search, Google Image has a reversed image search. By clicking on the camera icon, an image or the URL to an image can be uploaded and a search for websites that contain this image can be performed. If this particular image cannot be found, links to similar images are displayed.

You can also specify wildcards in queries, search for inflections, perform case insensitive search, look for particular parts of speech, or add, subtract, and divide ngrams.

Unlike Espacenet, Google Patents provides PDFs of patents that have been OCRed and are searchable. This is very helpful for quickly searching for information in long patents.

To keep up with current developments, you can create alerts for search terms. Legal proceedings can be found under case law. Search for ETH Zurich under Settings/Library Links and activate ETH Get It to access articles available in print at ETH.

When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. These statistical machine translations are not all perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages. Beware that when translating from one non-English language to another, the process in the background will entail two translations steps with English as a stopover.       

You can enter your own search terms, look at current hot trends (the top 20), check summaries from past years trends or the past week and look at geographical data associated with the searches.

These are available as german PDFs and are updated regularly to reflect the latest versions of the software. Apart from books on operating systems, office applications, web development and programming languages, there are also a few on auxialliary skills.

Enter title and abstract and the almighty algorithm will find the perfect spot for your opus magnum. The list of suggested journals includes typical timeline for refereeing, rejection rate, some impact metrics, open access fees and the expected embargo period.

KNIME can collect different types of data via import or webscraping. These can be processed in various ways and finally visualized or exported. A reusable workflow can be quickly created by drag-and-drop and linking so-called nodes (processing unit). To implement more complex applications, it is possible to integrate Python, R or Wekascripts. For chemical applications there is integration with JChem/Marvin and Schrödinger, which requires buying a separate licence.

Authors can describe their research in plain language, add supplementary information, and then communicate it via social media channels or email. The effect of these actions can be measured via a wide range of metrics.

The Kudos dashboard provides statistics about downloads, citation count, Altmetric score, and many more metrics. It is also an overview of the articles including the additional context and resources that were added by the user.

There is a special registration URL for D-CHAB members. Please contact Dr. Oliver Renn.

Online dictionaries German-English, -French, -Spanish-, -Italian, -Chinese,- Russian, -Portuguese and -Polish, as well as English-Spanish, -French and -Russian including a forum to discuss translations.

Currently, direct links are implemented in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, Embase and Wikipedia. Select your own institution when installing, and, if no online access is available, but a print edition is, then you will be taken directly to the corresponding page in Swisscovery.

Linguee is a unique combination of an editorial dictionary and a search engine. The search results are divided into two parts in Linguee. First, you see clearly structured results from the reliably edited dictionary. This gives you a quick overview of the translation options. Moreover, there are set examples from other sources that give you an impression of how your keyword is translated in context.

When you join LinkedIn, you can showcase your work and yourself to get spotted by employers or headhunters, stay in touch with (former) colleagues and business partners, find professionals with certain qualifications, get access to people, jobs, news, updates, and insights based on your network.

Note: Carefully adjust settings to avoid sending or getting unneccessary notifications (spam mail).

In Mendely you can process your collected pdfs with highlighter, sticky notes and comments, and tagging with keywords can help to retrieve your information at a later point. Mendely databases, attached files and annotations can be synchronized across many devices and with other people. Supports MS Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and BibTeX (via export).

Mendeley also tries to suggest potentially interesting literature based on your library via algorithm.

The Mendeley Institutional Edition which has been licensed by the ETH Bibliothek is a premium version of Mendeley in which the core Mendeley capabilities are enhanced (sharing libraries) and more cloud space is available (100 GB). ETH library regularly offers hands-on training sessions.

Metager won't track you and won't create user profiles. You can even open your search results without being tracked by the sites you visit.

You can organise and connect notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars and reminders. It is also possible to collaborate with other people. Free academic version with your ETH email address.

Text data are stored as easily re-exportable markdown files. For retrieval there's text search, tags, links between notes or a visualization as a network. There is a large community that actively develops extensions. Automation of processes, templates, aggregation of data, the possibilities are endless.

The plugin is available for Firefox, Safari and Chrome and after installation it appears as a button in the plugin bar. When you are on the website of the article and click on the icon, it will search for a free version of the article. If none is found, you can also contact the author to ask for a free version.

ORCID can be used when submitting new manuscripts, so that your ORCID publication list will be automatically updated. You can import earlier publications via Crossref or Scopus and it is possible to create a detailed profile in ORCID.

With over 100 built-in 2D and 3D graph types their point-and-click customization Origin makes it easy to create publication-quality figures. Origin allows the user to automatically update data and parameters, create templates for repetitive tasks, perform batch operations, connect with other programs (MATLAB, LabVIEW, Microsoft Excel) or create custom routines using scripting and C languages, embedded Python, or the R console. Origin also provides various tools for linear, polynomial and nonlinear curve and surface fitting. Additionally it is very helpful in peak analysis, signal processing and spectra fitting. Origin is available from the ETH IT-Shop.

In Overleaf several authors can work on the same document at the same time and all of them see the latest version. Comments can be added and changes can be tracked. Other valuable functions are the real-time preview and LaTeX error tracking. Integration of Dropbox, Github, Zotero & Mendeley is possible.

In Paperpile you can process your collected pdfs with Highlighter and Notes, and tagging with keywords can help to retrieve your information at a later point. A remarkable feature are summaries, which facilitate working with ideas, corresponding text snippets and their references. Databases, attached files and annotations can be synchronized across many devices.

Enter the name of your funder, institution and the journal to which you plan to submit an article, and the tool checks if this combination of funder, institution and journal offers any route to compliance with Plan S.

The current criteria for compliance center on whether a particular journal enables a researcher to publish an article under a CC BY licence without embargo, and retain sufficient copyright to enable compliance with open access policies.

The app Procreate has received the Apple Design award and is an App Store Essential. It ranks among the most powerful drawing and painting apps but is, nevertheless, intuitive to use and optimized for the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. The – not free – app is also ideal for artistic illustrations and cover design. The app comes with all kinds of pens, pencils, brushes, canvas, export and import functionalities and many options for customization.

The free handbook with 453 (Artist) respectively 261 pages (Pocket) is not really necessary to use the app – but an excellent service.

Publons provides verified peer review and bibliographic information. It details global peer review behavior and provides training resources for early career researchers. Tools are available for publishers to find peer reviewers.

Articles can be searched by DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, keyword or author. PubPeer has also contributed in revealing many cases of scientific misconduct.

Quarto allows you to combine create Markdown text or Jupyter notebooks with embedded code snippets of Python, Julia, R or Observable with the resulting output, be it numeric or graphic. It can be used to createe reports, presentations, websites, blogs and books. Output in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub.

Qwant won't track you and won't create user profiles. There are ads, but no ad cookies and trackers. You can even open your search results without being tracked by the sites you visit.

R offers a variety of options for importing, wrangling, processing and visualizing different types of data. ALL possible types of statistics can be easily executed. RStudio is the recommended standard graphical user interface. Since R is only one letter, using the CRAN acronym helps googling problems with the software.

In Papers you can process your collected pdfs with Highlighter and Notes, and tagging with keywords can help to retrieve your information at a later point. Pdfs cannot only be processed in the app, but also in the web application. Papers databases, attached files and annotations can be synchronized across many devices and with other people (up to 30), with unlimited storage space in the cloud. Supports MS Word, OpenOffice, Google Docs, Overleaf, Pages and Manuscript with BibTeX. Can connect to databases such as PubMed/Google Scholar/Dimensions.

Researcher is a digital periodical shelf where you can organize, access and read journals. New articles or issues are automatically marked so that you don't lose track. Articles can be saved and read offline at a later date. There are interfaces to Mendeley and Zotero.

Users can upload research information (papers, data, chapters, negative results, patents, research proposals, methods, presentations, and software code). Users may also follow the activities of other users and engage in discussions with them. There is a function to directly ask for author versions of articles. RG shows also the h-index of a scientist, in addition to the proprietary RG score, which depends on the activity in the network.

Note: Carefully adjust settings to avoid sending or getting unnecessary notifications (spam mail).

The International DOI Foundation (IDF) manages the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) system and also provides retrieval tools. Type or paste a DOI number into the text box and click Go. Your browser will take you to the Web page (URL) associated with that DOI.

If you find anything suspicious in a paper you can contact the Reatraction Watch team and they might investigate. There is also a list of papers they are already under scrutiny and a searchable database of retracted articles.

These can be own documents or scientific articles via DOI. Summaries with one or two sections can be created at the push of a button, but also flashcards can be created.

One can search by author, DOI or title of an article and scite shows a quick overview whether the article was mentioned positively, neutrally or negatively. One can also quickly consult the corresponding text passages in the citing articles. scite is chargeable and available from USD 12 per month.

There are distinct search APIs for Scopus, authors and affiliation; there are retrieval APIs for abstract, affiliation and author; there are metadata APIs for citation overviews, PlumX metrics, journal search, journal details and finally there is an API for subject classification. The Python package pybliometrics provides an efficient toolbox for working with the Scopus APIs.

Sherpa Romeo quickly and clearly summarizes which embargo periods apply to which version of the manuscript, as well as which Creative Commons licenses are used. In case of Open Access obligation by the funder, the embargo period may also be shorter than usual.

You get the results from Google, but without leaving any traces. Neither are IP addresses stored, nor is personal data gathered or passed on to third parties, and no identifying cookies are placed on your browser. Startpage also offers secure SSL encryption, a proxy option that allows anonymous web surfing, full third-party certification, and numerous other privacy features.

Statista provides statistical data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources. Industry and company information with key figures on over 1000 companies, trend analyses and forecasts, historical and current facts - the database bundles information for your basic research.

The data sets are prepared according to scientific criteria and for each statistic the available metadata such as source, publication date, number of respondents, etc. are published. Thus, the information is verifiable on Statista and can be used for your research in a scientifically secured way.

Within ETH, edu-ID allows you to order books or copies of articles via Swisscovery or rent a locker at the information center. Don't forget to link your ID to you ETH-Profile, otherwise there might be fees when ordering books from e.g. Zentralbibliothek Zürich (ZB). Edu-ID can also be used to access Swiss MOOC, Nationallizenzen, some Moodle or OLAT courses or services such as SWITCHdrive.

There is no data collection and additionally the links are checked for malware.

The app Sketches is a sketching app that was developed particularly for mobile devices, featuring a comprehensive set of tools. Sketches is ideal for converting relevant information from photos into a drawing. The free version allows to use more than 4 layers. Sketches is also ideal for artistic techniques, like water color and acrylic painting. Online tutorials can be found on Vimeo.

The free online thesaurus for the English language convinces with lexical quality and innovative technology. Not only synonyms and antonyms can be found. The thesaurus inspires and also helps you find the appropriate words

To view user numbers, just add a plus sign to the short link.

A free online conversion tool to easily convert between different units of measurement in more than 70 categories. The Unit Conversion Tool software is also available for download (USD 30.-).

The plugin is available for Firefox and Chrome and after installation a green or gray padlock appears when you visit the web page of a journal article. Clicking on the green version returns the freely available version of the article, whereas gray means that, unfortunately, no free version was found.

These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature. Data from Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, Lens, PubMed, Crossref, Europe PMC, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, OpenCitations, and WikiData are natively supported.

WolframAlpha is based on the software Mathematica. The search engine works particularly well for content from exact sciences and is available also as an app. Here you can solve integrals or equations, convert units or calculate various things.

Words or word groups that occur more frequently in the text are displayed proportionally larger. If certain words are overrepresented, they can also be scaled using the logarithm or square root of the numbers. Clouds can be designed with different fonts, layouts and color schemes. The images can be saved as svg, png or JSON.

The blogs can be used for various purposes: As a themed blog for an interested audience, as a forum for the discussion of current literature, as a platform for the exchange of like-minded people, as an archive of read articles, travel or photo diaries, etc... Each ETH member can run up to 5 blogs free of charge.

In Zotero you can process your collected pdfs with Highlighter and Notes, and tagging with keywords can help to retrieve your information at a later point. Pdfs cannot only be processed in the app, but also in the web application. Papers databases, attached files and annotations can be synchronized across many devices and with other people. Supports MS Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and BibTeX (via export). Can connect to databases like PubMed/Google Scholar/Dimensions/Crossref/arXiv. For ETH members, there's unlimited storage space.