Tools

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.

Adobe InDesign facilitates the layout and typesetting of multi-page documents, such as academic journals, books, brochures, posters, and reports. It allows for the precise management of typography, grid structures, and master pages to ensure consistent formatting across extensive documents. The software supports the integration of vector graphics from Adobe Illustrator and raster images from Adobe Photoshop, enabling the compilation of media for print and digital distribution. Furthermore, users can generate interactive PDFs, tables of contents, and cross-references, which assists in the production of complex academic or promotional materials.

Adobe Photoshop is used for editing, processing, and retouching pixel-based images. It can be used to adjust contrast, brightness, and color balance in photographs. The application includes tools for layering, masking, and quantitative image analysis, including the ability to measure pixel intensity or area. Additionally, it supports figure preparation by allowing the cropping, resizing, and alignment of multiple raster elements into composite images.

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, podcasts, academic networks and other sources. Links to the individual sources are provided upon clicking the donut. With your NETHZ credentials you can access Altmetric Browser to explore and analyze the publications of ETH Zurich.

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, a copy remains accessible, however, it is not updated.

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.

It operates on a drag-and-drop interface and offers a library of templates, shapes, typography options, and stock media assets. In professional and educational environments, it allows for the structured alignment of visual components and text without requiring advanced design training. The system supports team collaboration through shared links, permitting multiple individuals to edit, comment, and export design assets simultaneously.

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.

What makes Cite Them Right unique is the range of referencing styles which can be accessed, including Chicago, Harvard, APA, IEEE, MLA; as well as teaching the user how to reference just about any source. This platform contains useful articles and videos which help to guide students into common queries around referencing, including how to avoid plagiarism and understanding the differences between secondary and primary sources.

All researchers and students face the risk of missing out on related literature because of the use of different vocabulary. Connected Papers may find such papers based on citation patterns.

With a click, another paper in the graph can be used as a seed paper, or alternatively, can be added as a second seed paper. Results can be exported.

Results highly depend on the graph of the chosen seed paper. When using keyword search, the ranking criteria of the hitlist are obscure.

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.

In academic and professional settings, it is used to translate research papers, abstracts, and correspondences while preserving the original contextual meaning and domain-specific terminology. The platform supports the direct upload and processing of entire files, such as Word documents, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations, maintaining the layout and formatting of the source material. It also offers glossary functionalities, allowing users to define specific translations for technical terms to ensure consistency across documents. ETH Zurich licenses DeepL Translate Pro. Users can get a license in the ETH IT Shop.

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, for example, a list of possible dates for a meeting, and send them to everyone via a link. You can choose to receive email updates for each person who has just completed the poll. The most popular options are highlighted in real time, and the final results can be exported as an Excel file.

Doodle can be integrated with calendars from Outlook, Teams, Google, Zoom, and others. This means that new appointments added to the calendar are automatically marked as “busy” in the polls.

DuckDuckGo respects your privacy, meaning it does not log IP addresses or use identifying cookies. DuckDuckGo operates without collecting personal data, does not share personal data, and uses a secure, encrypted connection. AI features are opt-in, and there is also a DuckDuckGo browser.

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, PDF full texts can be annotated and enriched with notes and keywords to make their content easier to retrieve. Endnote databases, documents, and annotations can be easily synchronized across multiple devices. EndNote supports MS Word, OpenOffice and BibTeX (via export) and offers connections to numerous bibliographic databases, such as PubMed and Web of Science, as well as library catalogues such as swisscovery.

Many valuable features are restricted in the free online 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 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".

Google Gemini is a multimodal artificial intelligence model designed to process, analyze, and generate text, code, images, and other data types simultaneously. In research and professional settings, it functions to summarize academic literature, draft text sections, analyze technical code, and assist in data extraction from varied source documents. The system operates through natural language prompts, allowing users to cross-reference information, refine written content for clarity, and generate structured summaries of complex, multi-disciplinary datasets. ETH Zurich licenses Google Gemini with enterprise data protection. With this protection, user data is not used to train models and is not reviewed by humans. ETH Members can obtain a Google Workspace license from the ETH IT Shop.

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. It's useful to get an overview, but it will never replace proper reading.

This cross-platform program (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is the ideal solution for editing, optimizing, and retouching pixel-based photos. GIMP offers an extensive range of features, ranging from simple cropping to complex photo montages with multiple layers, masks, and filters. Thanks to its active community, numerous free plugins are available to extend its capabilities, and the program supports almost all common image formats. Whether you’re quickly enhancing contrast for a presentation, cropping objects for scientific posters, or creating entirely new digital graphics - GIMP provides professional tools without monthly subscription fees, making it an indispensable tool for budget-conscious creatives and researchers.

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.

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.

Grammarly is a cloud-based writing assistant that analyzes English text for spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, and tone errors. In academic and professional contexts, it identifies sentence structures that may hinder readability and offers alternative phrasing to ensure clear communication. The software can be integrated directly into web browsers, word processors, and email clients, providing real-time corrections and suggestions. It also includes features for checking plagiarism against a database of published materials and web pages.

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.

Inkscape is ideal for designing and editing vector-based graphics. It offers a vast range of features, ranging from simple shapes to complex illustrations with paths, text, and gradients. Its native file format is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), which guarantees lossless scaling for both the web and print. Thanks to its active community, numerous free extensions are available. Whether you’re creating diagrams and logos for a presentation, designing layouts for scientific posters, or drawing entirely new digital graphics - Inkscape provides professional tools without monthly subscription fees, making it an indispensable tool for budget-conscious creatives and researchers.

Inoreader lets you subscribe to and centralize RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and social media channels. The tool includes features for saving articles to read later, filtering, searching, and automation rules, as well as AI-powered text summarization features (“Inoreader Intelligence”). The basic version is free to use after registration, while advanced automation features, unlimited feeds, and better third-party integrations require paid subscriptions.

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.

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.

Online dictionaries German-English, -French, -Spanish-, -Italian, -Chinese,- Russian, -Portuguese and -Polish, as well as English-Spanish, -French and -Russian and finally Spanish-Portugues. There is 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.

Nomad saves you a few clicks and reduces loading times, especially when regularly browsing and skimming through the latest magazine issues. The downside is that navigating to supporting materials is a bit more tedious.

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).

The free, open-source distribution let's you run different development enviroments (JupyterLab, JupyerNotebook, PyCharm, Spyder, RStudio und 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 fast and compact.

The database is based on a corpus of some hundred postgraduate dissertations completed at the University of Manchester and has been further expanded by analysing academic articles from a range of disciplines. As the items in the database are mostly generic in nature using them does not constitute plagiarism. Sentence templates for different sections of academic research articles (Introduction, Results, Discussion, Conclusions) are available as well as templates for various language functions such as expressing criticism, explaing causality, describing trends, etc. The Manchester Academic Phrasebank was created by Dr. John Morley, the director of the university-wide Language Programmes at The University of Manchester.

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, 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.

Mind the Graph is an online infographic maker designed to assist researchers in creating graphical abstracts, presentation slides, and scientific posters. It features a digital repository of biological, medical, and chemical illustrations categorized by scientific discipline. Users can select templates, combine illustrations with custom charts, and adjust design properties such as color and layout to communicate research findings. The platform provides export options that comply with the format and resolution criteria of international peer-reviewed journals.

This cross-platform application is based on large language models. It is designed for the automated processing and generation of text, answering queries, and writing source code. Additionally, the tool includes features for AI-based image generation. Copilot can be used as a standalone web service or integrated into Microsoft 365 applications. The basic version is free to use after registration, while advanced features and deeper integrations with EndNote can be licensed through a Microsoft Cloud subscription in the ETH IT Shop.

NotebookLM is an AI-powered note-taking and research assistant application developed by Google. It allows users to upload source documents, such as research PDFs, notes, transcripts, and articles, into a localized notebook workspace. The system uses these specific sources as a grounding database to answer queries, generate summaries, extract key citations, and outline concepts without drawing from broader, external internet data. This facilitates targeted synthesis and review of specific literature collections or project files. ETH Zurich licenses NotebookLM with enterprise data protection. With this protection, user data is not used to train models and is not reviewed by humans. ETH Members can obtain a Google Workspace license from the ETH IT Shop.

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.

Open Policy Finder 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.

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.

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, with unlimited storage space in the cloud. An AI assistant allows to chat with publications. The citation tool SmartCite supports MS Word and Google Docs. The Papers browser extension can connect to databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar and Dimensions.

The platform includes inline citations and links directly to source materials, ensuring transparency and facilitating verification.

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 create reports, presentations, dashboards, 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.

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).

In ResearchRabbit, articles relevant to a specific topic can be added, for example by entering the DOIs or by linking ResearchRabbit with Zotero. ResearchRabbit then evaluates the bibliographic relationships (references and citations, similar keywords) between these and other articles and suggests further relevant papers. Alerts on newly published relevant articles can also be sent. For each collection of papers, network visualizations can be generated that are very similar to those of VOSviewer.

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 searchable database of retracted articles.

SciSummary focuses on the evaluation of individual research articles. The content of the article is evaluated and summarized by the large language model, after which questions about the content can be asked via a chat. Existing illustrations are integrated into the summary, and the articles are also keyworded.

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, citation counts, 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.

With Scribus, you can precisely lay out flyers, brochures, magazines, and books using a flexible page layout system. In addition to versatile tools for typography, color management (CMYK and spot colors), and vector graphics, the program focuses primarily on professional print preparation. The program supports exporting to print-ready PDF/X formats as well as interactive PDFs and offers a wide range of import options for graphics and text files

You get the results from other search engines, 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.

Statista provides statistical data and contains over 1 million data sets concerning a broad range of topics and from more than 50,000 sources. Industry and company information with key figures, 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 on Statista is verifiable 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.

Trello uses digital lists and cards to neatly structure tasks, projects, and workflows. You can set deadlines, create checklists, attach documents, and assign team members, which greatly simplifies progress tracking. With automation features and integration with third-party tools (such as Google Drive or Slack), Trello can be flexibly incorporated into workflows: organizing research projects, planning publication deadlines as a team, or structuring your daily academic routine - the applications are numerous.

To view user numbers, just add a plus sign to the short link. For links outside ETH Zurich, we recommend t1p.

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, LibreOffice and BibTeX (via export). Can connect to databases like PubMed, Google Scholar, Dimensions, Crossref, arXiv. For ETH members, there's unlimited storage space.