PhD Toolkit

This repository offers a list of tools and pieces of advice to new PhD students and other researchers.

Bibliography

Managing articles

• Zotero is a good bibliography manager.

  • There is a Zotero plugin to use automatically SciHub to retrieve PDFs when they are not open access: https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub.

• W3C recommendations can have a BibTeX bibliography entry using the site: https://w2.syronex.com/jmr/w3c-biblio.

Looking for related works

Find PDFs

• Google Scholar is the Google portal specialized for scientific articles. It will show the different versions of an article that are hosted on the web.

• SciHub: Bypassing paywalls is illegal, and you should NOT use a website such as SciHub to enter a DOI and get the PDF you could not access in return.

• HAL: All INRIA researchers have to upload their research articles in open access to HAL.

  • You must upload the PDF of any article you publish while you are at INRIA. You can upload an author version as soon as it is accepted for publication.

• On Twitter (X) and on Mastodon, the hashtag #canihazpdf given with a reference to an article will signal to the community of researchers that you are searching for the PDF of this article.

Find articles

• Connected Papers gives you a view of the articles that are connected to a given paper in its field.

• PURE Suggest gives you the list of the most related papers in relation to a list of given papers.

• Litmaps generates a visualization of the most relevant article related to a given paper.

Writing

Grammar, typos, and style

• Hemingway editor gives you recommendations on the style of your English.

• Grammarly is a free grammar check in your browser. It works great with Hemingway.

• Grammalecte is an open-source equivalent to Grammarly, for French.

• outwrite another Grammarly available in several languages

LaTeX

• The LaTeX article on Wikibooks contains most of the commands that are useful for writing a LaTeX document.

• The savetrees package automatically reduces the size of the text of your article. There are 3 modes:

  • \usepackage[subtle]{savetrees}: Mostly reduce the insertion of whitespaces in text.
  • \usepackage[moderate]{savetrees}: Reduces spaces around figures, paragraphs, tables, etc., in a relatively non-style-breaking manner.
  • \usepackage[extreme]{savetrees}: Not recommended, it reduces everything it can reduce in the article.

• The todonotes package allows you to create notes in the PDF either in the margin or in the text itself. An example of this is given in a dedicated file.

Networking

• ORCiD creates for you a unique identifier and a page in which you can concentrate your publications and links to your different pages on the web. It is very useful to share your publications with other services. It interfaces with HAL, Google Scholar, and many other services.

• HAL also generates an unique identifier for you, and it can generate a curriculum vitae for you from your publications.

• ResearchGate is one of the main social networks for researchers. It is particularly useful to find, or even request, PDFs directly on their author page.

• Academia is another social network for researchers. It is particularly useful to find, or even request, PDFs directly on their author page.

Conference/Journal finding

Conference ranking

• Conference ranks

• GII-GRIN-SCIE (GGS) Conference Rating

Datasets, Code and Experiments

Code

• Anonymous GitHub anonymizes your GitHub repo for double-blind submissions

Datasets

• Zenodo

Using Virtual Environments in Jupyter Notebooks