hello it's seo from tbhtudying and i thought it would be fun to kick off the new year by
giving you guys a comprehensive list of my favorite digital tools to use for academia.
i'm an undergrad student. i'm a biology and anthropology double major and these are just
some of my favorite tools to use. if you're in the humanities, maybe you have some other
favorite tools that you like to use, but these in particular are the ones that are the general go-to
for everyday school life at college. the first thing i want to talk about are research databases.
my favorite ones to use are google scholar and pubmed because they're free to use and access
without any sort of like, payment or institutional access necessarily, so i feel like these two
are the most accessible for people around the world. but if you do have institutional access,
i also like web of science and JSTOR. these are really great for finding journal articles,
research papers, and literature reviews for different presentations, research projects,
or papers you might have to write. and if you do run into some institutional access paywalls,
then i like using scihub to unlock them. scihub is a website that's best for journal article that
have a DOI number or link associated with them. the scihub website has multiple proxies so i would
suggest googling scihub and then going through all the different websites that show up to see which
proxy will work, but you just paste in the DOI number in and it'll give you the accessible pdf of
that journal article. google scholar and pubmed, in tandem with scihub, are my go-to's for just
accessing research articles and things like that. now for organizing for those citationsa nd papers,
i like using zotero. it's my favorite organization tool for research articles and you can put in
different identification numbers such as the DOI, the ISBN, or the pubmed ID number and it'll
instantly add it to your library. but you can also customize your own citation for various podcasts,
journal articles, newspapers, recordings, interviews, whatever it is that you need to cite,
you can put your information in there and it'll organizize it for you. there's also this really
useful extension that works with google drive where you can automatically add in citations
and it'll automatically update your bibliography for that paper as well as for everything you
cite. zotero is my personal favorite to use. other similar tools to use for citations and
research organization is mendeley. i believe you need institutional access for mendeley,
which is why i prefer zotero, and if you just need a bibliography or reference formatting,
then sites like easybib, citationmachine. i think refme is another site that you could use,
so these are all sites that are easy and available to use, but zotero is still my favorite.
i have the desktop version downloaded, so i can just automatically put things in whenever i come
across them, and i also have the extension for google drive, which is a great segue into my next
favorite digital tool, which is just the general google suite of apps, whether that be google docs
or google sheets. this is a great free alternative to microsoft word, microsoft excel, powerpoint,
etc, and i like google drive so much because i can access it wherever i am in the world as long as i
have an internet connection. i can just log in and access my documents, my sheets, my powerpoints,
whatever it isthat i have. even though microsoft has like their whole onedrive thing, i just find
that google drive is a lot easier to access on a variety of computers in a variety of places,
and i like that it automatically saves and updates everything, and i enjoy using different extensions
such as the zotero extension with goolge docs, so that it makes my life easier. the one app that
i do regularly use from the microsoft suite is onenote, which is a great alternative for digital
notes if you can't afford goodnotes or notability or if you just want to take easy, simple notes
on your computer. i find that onenote is easier to use for note-taking compared to google drive
because i like that i can put in different pages, different tabs, and then different
notebooks. so for me, if i'm taking digital notes, i prefer to do it on onenote. for everything else,
such as making slides, spreadsheets, essays, that's all done on google drive. this next one
is specifically an app called "officelens." i use this for scanning papers and making them into pdfs
with my phone. i don't always have a printer or a scanning machine readily available to me,
and sometimes, i just don't have the time to run to the library to scan something, so officelens
has been really great for scanning my papers and especially during COVID times, it's what i've
been using to scan my tests and submit it as a pdf form, so officelens has been my personal favorite.
pdfscanner used to be my favorite, but it's a little clunky now, and i like that officelens
is connected to my microsoft onedrive, so i can directly access it whenever i need.
the last set of apps i want to talk about is quizlet and anki. these are apps that i primarily
use for memorization, active recall, and learning. they're originally designed to be flashcard apps,
but they have active recall settings on them, and in particular, quizlet has the most
interesting settings in terms of learning because they have a lot of games, they have a lot of
active practice tests that they make using the flashcards that you input into them, whereas anki
is a little harder to start with and you have to figure out how to use anki before you can
actively make multiple kinds of flashcards for yourself, but both apps are useful in different
ways. quizlet has changed their puchasing plan from when i first used it in middle school,
but i still subscribe to it because it's just so useful for me and anki on the desktop is free,
but the app version on the apple store is not, so i only use anki on my desktop and i pay for yearly
subscriptions to quizlet for learning. those are all of the favorite digital tools and apps and
things i use on a day-to-day basis in college. if you have any suggestions or some of your favorite
digital tools that i didn't mention, feel free to list them down in the comments below, and i
would love to hear about it and maybe try them out for myself ,but these are just my favorite
that i use in college and i hope that they are useful to you as they are to me!! so thank you
so much for watching, happy new year everyone and i will see you in the next video. bye-bye!!