Tools that are part of my research workflow

Posted on July 5, 2020  •  2 minutes  • 278 words

In this post I share which tools are part of my day by day in research and that I would recommend.

Equipment

Besides a loyal MacBook Pro 💻, I use an iPad Pro for taking handwritten notes.

Software and apps

These have been useful during the different stages of my research workflow:

Planning

1. Goodnotes : For the notes. In the past I used notebooks, which I loved but being honest they were difficult to keep during the years. Goodnotes has good templates and basic features that help a lot. It also offers cloud integration with Dropbox, for example.
2. Todoist : For to do lists. I have tried many apps for this task, until I finally found todoist. It’s great that it has versions for both iOS and macOS, so you can keep your lists synchronised.
3. PowerPoint: I used it to prepare short presentations for some meetings with my advisor, in which I need to point out some results or plots and this is easier than scrolling through a LaTeX document.
4. Box and Dropbox: For cloud storage.

Coding

1. RStudio : Probably the best R IDE.
2. PyCharm : My favorite Python IDE. There are many others available out there.
3. Github and Bitbucket : For code repositories.

Writing and submissions

1. Overleaf : It took some months before I decided to officially move from Texstudio to this online LaTeX editor, but no regrets so far. It’s great for collaboration.
2. draw.io : A simple app for making diagrams.
3. Adobe Acrobat Reader : Not my favorite product, but useful when you need to read a submission reply that comes with a commented pdf file.

I hope you find some of them helpful to you.