Xunzi said in his Exhortation, “A gentleman’s nature is not different, and he is good at faking things.” Making good use of various tools can greatly improve our efficiency in life, and the same is true in scientific work. Today I would like to introduce to you the “seven weapons” used in scientific research and paper writing. With them, the writing of high quality paper will no longer be a problem.
1, Google schloar
Doing literature research is a very painful thing, because it is necessary to achieve “accurate” and “complete” at the same time. It is obviously a thankless task to search the common literature database one by one. Google Scholar search is a perfect solution to this problem.
In addition to all the literature databases, Google Scholar also includes the latest conference papers and pre-print texts, which is especially important in a field as fast as AI, since most of the latest results are not published in journals. You can Google keywords like “summay” or “review” to get the most up-to-date research on a particular area.
Google Scholar recorded the citation of a certain article, which greatly facilitated us to trace some ideas to the source.
Mail can be used to track the search results of a keyword, to ensure that the latest results of a mock mai mai tracking.
Google Scholar also supports export of document management software formats such as endnote.
2. Literature management tools
To write a good paper, you must first have a good Ideal. Ideal depends a lot on how much quality paper you read. Then how to manage these huge quantities of literature becomes a thorny problem. Here I recommend the endnote literature management software. It supports document batch import, grouping, star label, notes, PDF preview and other functions. My own application scenario looks like this:
In computer science, the latest and greatest papers tend to appear at the latest conferences, and I tend to read all of them. After downloading the papers from the Internet, import endnote software, then simply browse the titles and star them according to their importance. After browsing all papers, rank them in order of importance. Then read the papers with a focus, and take notes and classify them during reading.
When doing literature research on Google, I will download many papers in bulk in endnote format and sort them out in accordance with the above method.
If you see a good article in a journal, download it directly using endnote’s full-text search function
Endnote supports synchronization and sharing well.
In addition, if you are writing a paper in the world, you will use endnote to insert references. With some of the above uses, as long as you stick with it, you can make endnote into a huge library of papers that you can refer to or share with others when you want to read or write a paper.
3. Note-taking tools
As a saying goes, “A good memory is worse than a bad pen.” As you read a lot of literature, you need to take notes on your thoughts, doubts and inspirations. The best way, of course, is to record these things in electronic notes, which I recommend as notes, I am also a deep user of this product. Like most other note-taking tools, such as Evernote and Youdao Cloud Note-taking, it supports multi-terminal synchronization, MARDown note-taking, note classification and labeling and other major functions. The usage scenarios are as follows:
Put the intensive reading of the article classify themselves to create the directory below, for each document, will use markdown do some simple records, literature of PDF files will be in the form of attachment in the notes, finally will also add some tags to notes, including the innovation point of this article, solve problems, and worthy of reference, etc.
Usually, if you have a good idea, you will record it in the mobile phone terminal. Like endnote, weizhi Notes will become a library of ideas for papers over time. In the future, you can easily check it anytime, anywhere, and if you don’t remember an idea, you can use the search function to search for it.
4. Mind mapping
A lot of people don’t think much of mind mapping, but it’s a tool that many people vastly underestimate. Most people use mind maps for note-taking and spend a lot of time trying to make it look good. Essentially, a mind map is a tool that helps us think. Our brain is like a computer with limited memory. It is impossible to hold many questions and think at the same time. Therefore, we need an “external memory”, a mind map, to help us think. Two mind mapping tools are recommended here
White paper and pencil
I like to use a pencil to draw a mind map on a piece of white paper. Brainstorm and write down all the ideas, then think about how they relate to each other, merge or delete the ideas, and then the last few things are the most important ones. Through this divergent and then abstract thinking process, we can think clearly about many problems. So a true mind map should be haphazard and reflect the thought process.
the Brain
For those of you who might be used to mind mapping software, the Brain is recommended. At present, almost all mind mapping software on the market can not show the network structure of thinking, they can only express the tree topology. The brain is characterized by multi-center nodes. A node has not only child nodes and parent nodes, but also a jump node, so that the brain map can completely simulate the human thinking process. If I have a project with a long time span, I will use the Brain to do mind mapping because it is easy to save. Under normal circumstances, I am still used to drawing on paper, and the feeling of dripping dripping makes my thinking more smooth.
5, Adobe Illustrator (AI)
A good paper includes fine drawings. General paper drawing using Microsoft Visio or Adobe Illustrator. AI’s biggest advantage over the former is that all it produces are vectors. The biggest characteristic of vector map is independent of resolution, no matter how we expand and shrink, will not distortion. Adobe Illustrator installation is complicated, and the software is also large, inconvenient or do not like friends can use the web version of AI. Go to https://uzer.me/ and choose the AI app. The experience on the web side is also quite good. Here is my flow chart using AI
6. Charting tools
Beautiful diagrams are just as important as flowcharts to make your paper more convincing. Here I recommend Matplotlib. It is the most widely used and powerful python drawing package, and many other visualization packages are developed on top of Matplotlib. Master it and you’ll be able to draw almost any icon you want. Go to the gallery on matplotlib’s official website and you can see many examples. If you want to draw a picture, you can find the corresponding example directly and copy the code to make adjustments.
7, overleaf
Finally, a cloud-based latex editing tool is introduced. Overleaf can save you a lot of latex configuration time, and it also supports real-time compilation and preview, as well as journal contributions.
That’s it for these seven tools. The use of them varies according to different people, and people can have their own way of using them. It is important to really understand the logic and thinking behind these tools, so as to make a fine grain school of equipment that can win without recruitment.
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