One way or another, all students need to write a research paper. Choosing the topic is the easiest part but when it comes to putting that topic on paper, it becomes tricky. From doing research and making notes, through literature management and team evaluation, to writing the thesis statement and headline, and finally checking grammar and spelling, it’s easy to conclude that it takes much time and effort to wrap up a research paper. Luckily, there are tons of tools that can help you out, so let’s get started:
I Research Tools
Research is the most important part of every research paper. It implies a lot of creativity and consistency. There is no tool that can do the research for you, but at least some of them can help you save time and better organize the materials and information you come across. Internet libraries such as World Digital Library or ipl2 are historical databases with a lot of knowledge treasure you can find. Once you’ve found everything you need to start writing, it’s wise to have Evernote to organize your collection.
II Evaluation and Preparation Tools
Okay, you found everything you need, so now it’s time to sort things out and see what can be used and how. Mendeley is a good reference management program for managing your literature. It makes every literature review process easier and your research more organized. Once you have sorted out your literature collection and organized your data, the next step is evaluation. For this you need team collaboration tools, because you need to get feedback from someone else, your college peer or a professor. There are really tons of such tools but Dropbox is maybe the most reliable. Dropbox keeps your research paper safe and at the same time easily accessible to other people you want to get involved in the evaluation. Sometimes you will have to make historical charts, statistical tables or any other form of data that implies using spreadsheets. In that case, Microsoft Excel is the number one choice. There is no better tool than MS Excel for organizing data, but if you prefer to put your data in the cloud, you can use Google Sheets and still do excellent work.
III Writing Tools
Finally you’ve reached the stage where you can actually start writing the paper. If you did your research and prepared your data properly, there is no need to worry – words will write themselves. However, you still need a set of tools for writing. First of all, the MS Word if you prefer desktop tools, or Google Docs if you are more comfortable with online tools. Since thesis statement is the most important sentence in every research paper, try using this thesis statement generator which can help you generate your thesis. If you are having troubles with the headline, there are a lot of headline generators as well, and surely one of them can help you think of the best possible title for your paper. During your writing you may run out of words or notice that you’re using the same words over and over again. Thesaurus is a very useful website with a large number of synonyms and it can definitely help you make your research paper sound more impressive and academic. In the end, don’t forget to include citations. Since you probably use them in your work, you have to cite all the bibliographies you have used in your writing. The most popular citation tools are OttoBib and EasyBib.
IV Editing Tools
When you have finished writing the research paper, you need to check if there are spelling or grammar mistakes. Turning in a paper with spelling mistakes will just ruin all your effort and work, and it will make it look like you haven’t been so dedicated, although you were. Again, there are a lot of tools that correct spelling and grammar errors and Grammarly and Reverso are some of them. Also, if your research paper needs images, experiment with some of the image finders. Once you’ve finally completed the editing process, let’s assume you want to save your file in PDF because it will best preserve your research paper, and you won’t have to worry whether the file’s formatting will be messed up when opened on your professor’s computer. To create a PDF, you can use a PDF creation tool called PDF Converter Elite which also converts PDFs to different file formats. This feature may be helpful when you want to edit your research paper or any work you previously saved in PDF.
All these fantastic, time-saving tools and websites we mentioned here allow you to focus only on research and producing excellent papers, so we strongly urge you to give them a try or find similar aids to help you out in your academic pursuits.