15 Best Research Tools for Students

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Research is a critical skill for students. So, you're not alone if you have ever felt overwhelmed by the prospect of writing a paper or trying to get organized before tackling an assignment. I have been there, too, knowing a lot is at stake. The grades I earned in school helped determine which college I would attend and, ultimately, the trajectory of my life.

A solid grasp of research skills helped me through that process, and today, I want to help you, too. In this guide, we'll explore the best research tools for students to enhance their research skills so that they can write efficient papers, summaries, and articles with AI assistance. One tool you can use to help improve your research skills is Unriddle's AI research assistant. This tool can help you get organized to improve the quality of your work and the speed at which you produce it.

Why Do Students Need Research Tools

Snag Relevant Information Like a Pro

Research tools help students quickly find relevant information from various sources, allowing them to focus on analyzing and synthesizing data rather than spending excessive time searching for it.

Access Credible Sources With Research Tools

Tools like academic databases, citation managers, and journal access services provide students access to peer-reviewed and credible sources, ensuring their work is based on accurate and reliable information.

Organize Information to Stay On Track

Tools like note-taking apps, reference managers (e.g., Zotero, EndNote), and project management software help students organize their research, track sources, and maintain a structured approach to their studies.

Build Skills for Future Success

Using research tools teaches students essential academic skills, such as critical thinking, data analysis, and the proper use of citations, which are valuable in both academic and professional settings.

Collaborate with Peers Effectively

Some research tools facilitate collaboration by allowing multiple students to work on a project simultaneously, share notes, and communicate effectively, which is especially useful for group assignments.

Avoid Plagiarism

Tools like plagiarism checkers help students ensure their work is original and properly cited, reducing the risk of unintentional plagiarism.

Stay Current with Research Tools

Research tools often provide access to the latest studies, trends, and developments in a field, helping students stay up-to-date with new knowledge and theories.

What Research Tools Are Necessary For Students

Reference Management Software: Your Research Assistant

Academic research means lots of reading, not just of primary sources but also of secondary and tertiary literature, and then writing about what you have read. You will need to keep track of all these references, and that's where academic reference management software comes in.

Unriddle AI, Mendeley, and Endnote are some tools that allow researchers to organize and manage their bibliographic references and citations. This can be particularly helpful for extensive literature reviews, as it allows researchers to easily search and access their reference library and format citations and bibliographies in various styles.

Additionally, many reference management tools offer features like annotation and collaboration, so researchers can share their reference libraries with colleagues and work on them together.

Data Visualization Software: See Your Data Clearly

Once you collect your data, you must analyze it thoroughly to uncover trends and patterns that answer your research questions. Data visualization software, like Tableau or R, can help you explore and understand your data.

These tools allow researchers to create interactive visualizations from their data, such as charts, graphs, and maps. This can be very useful for identifying patterns and trends that might not be immediately apparent from raw data. These tools also provide a way to communicate the findings from their research clearly and effectively, as visualizations can be more easily understood than raw data.

Data Collection Software: Streamline Your Survey Process

Data collection software is another crucial tool that can support the research process. It can be used to design and administer surveys, collect and store data, and manage participant information. It can be used to conduct surveys online or in person.

This software also provides features like skip logic, data validation, and data export, which can help ensure data quality and facilitate analysis. Some data collection software also integrates with data visualization or statistical software, making it easy to analyze and visualize once data is collected.

Read faster & write better — try Unriddle for free today.

AI for Academic Research

Collaborative Research

Academic Research

Research Team

Research Process

Industry Research

Research Skills

Research Collaboration

Which Tool is Best For Research?

Unriddle: The Best Research Tool for Students

Students who want to improve their research skills should check out Unriddle AI. Unriddle helps students read faster and write better. The tool quickly finds information in documents, simplifies complex topics, and takes notes using the power of AI. Unriddle is trusted by thousands of researchers and students, from the classroom to the boardroom.

How Does Unriddle Work?

Unriddle generates an AI assistant on top of any document so you can quickly find, summarize, and understand information. Unriddle understands the meaning behind your writing and automatically links you to relevant things you’ve read and written about. Highlight text, and Unriddle will show you the most relevant sources from your library using AI.

Never lose a citation again. Generate text with AI autocomplete to improve and expand your writing, with suggestions based on the context of your work. Step into a collaborative workspace where everyone can contribute and chat with the same documents in real-time and much more!

How to Organize Research Papers

How to Read Academic Papers

AI Tools for Academic Research

Research Tips

Research Collaboration Software

Academic Collaboration

Traditional Research

Research Collaborations

Research Lab Management

Best Apps for Grad Students

Benefits of Research Skills For Students

Research skills are invaluable to university students in various aspects of their academic journey and beyond. Here are some key benefits:

Academic Success

Practical research skills allow students to find relevant information, support their academic arguments with evidence, and produce well-researched assignments, leading to higher grades.

Critical Thinking

Research involves analyzing and evaluating information critically, enabling students to assess the validity of sources and make informed judgments.

Problem-Solving

Students with solid research skills can tackle complex questions or problems, approach challenges systematically, and break them down into manageable components.

Information Literacy

Research skills contribute to information literacy, where students can navigate various sources, distinguish between reliable and unreliable information, and ethically use and cite sources.

Learning Mindset

Research skills cultivate a mindset of continuous learning. Students recognize the importance of curiosity, seeking new knowledge, and adapting to evolving information and research methodologies.

15 Best Research Tools for Students

1. Unriddle AI: Revolutionize Your Research

Unriddle AI offers an intelligent way to tackle research projects. It helps you read faster and write better, so you can spend less time figuring out what you’re working with and more time on your ideas. Unriddle AI allows you to quickly find information in documents, take notes, simplify complex topics, and write with the power of AI. Unriddle is trusted by thousands of students and researchers, from the classroom to the boardroom.

The tool generates an AI assistant on top of any document so you can quickly find, summarize, and understand information. Unriddle understands the meaning behind your writing and automatically links you to relevant things you’ve read and written about.

Highlight text, and Unriddle will use AI to show you the most relevant sources from your library. Never lose a citation again. Generate text with AI autocomplete to improve and expand your writing, with suggestions based on the context of your work. Step into a collaborative workspace where everyone can contribute and chat with the same documents in real-time and much more!

2. Generate Citations and Bibliographies in Seconds With MyBib

MyBib is a free bibliography and citation generator. It allows you to generate formatted bibliographies, citations and works cited from various sources, including websites, books, journals, videos, blog posts, book chapters, conference papers, reports, journal articles, images, theses, ebooks, encyclopedia entries, movies, personal communications, maps, dictionary entries, and many more.

MyBib supports hundreds of citation styles, including APA 6 and 7, Chicago, Harvard and Harvard (Australia), MLA 8, and MLA 9., among others. Using MyBib will enable you to quickly build and add your bibliography to your academic papers and assignments. MyBib also allows you to export citations to other citation managers such as Mendeley and Zotero.

3. Zotero: Collect and Organize Research Efficiently

Zotero helps you collect all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes.

4. LucidChart: Create Visual Aids to Understand Research

Lucidchart is an excellent instrument based on infographics. This software's diagrams help understand people’s behavior, data, and processes. The visualization allows to find out the interdependence between different phenomena. If you have a large bulk of information to process before generating a topic, this should be your choice.

5. Google Scholar: Use the Best Scholarly Search Engine

The same company that produced the world’s top search engine also offers the world’s top scholarly search engine. Google Scholar works just like Google. But it directly links you to publications in countless academic journals. When using the system, look at the right-hand side of the search results. Then, Google Scholar shows you if a PDF is available for each article.

6. Scopus: Access a Comprehensive Bibliographic Database

Scopus is a bibliographical base used by over five thousand academic, governmental, and corporate establishments. It searches through about 75 million entries, including 194’000 books. You can search by author, document title, or affiliation. It shows the citation rate of almost any article from any discipline. The tool also suggests similar documents by related references, which could accelerate your research.

7. JSTOR: Find Academic Content Across Disciplines

This database searches for books, primary sources, and journals. It provides free access to open community collections of museums, public libraries, and archives. Due to the COVID-19 displacement of students, the resource has a special offer for free use of unlicensed materials. Still, only the participating educational institutions are eligible. You can share your lists with other users if you wish.

8. Obsidian: Take Notes Without Losing Your Mind

Obsidian Notes is a note-taking app that can also be used as an editor or knowledge base. You can use it to take notes in classes, keep track of your research for papers, or organize anything else you want to keep track of. You can create new pages from scratch or import text from other files. It’s easy to organize your notes with tags and folders to keep everything tidy.

Obsidian’s biggest strength is its flexibility. You can make it as straightforward or as complicated as you want. You can customize the look and feel of the app with themes and change its behavior with plugins. If you’re easily distracted, there’s even a mode that hides everything but the text on the page: no menus, no buttons, only words.

9. ResearchGate: Connect With Other Researchers

ResearchGate provides more than 135 million publication pages. The tool is an excellent solution for keeping up with the latest research news. It allows you to share your research with peers, collaborate with them across continents, and ask for expert support. You can also track how many people have read or referenced your work.

10. Science Direct: Access Peer-Reviewed Literature

ScienceDirect focuses on medical, technical, engineering, and scientific research, but humanities are also covered. It provides access to foundational and theoretic materials and the latest findings. You can search by keywords, author, title of book or journal, volume, issue, and page. All the literature is peer-reviewed and can be trusted.

11. EndNote: Organize References and Collaborate With Others

Endnote gives you the tools to search, organize, and share your research. It allows you to easily create bibliographies while writing your following paper with features like Cite While You Write. Maximize your time with features like finding full text for your references and automatically updating records. Whether on your desktop, online, or iPad, EndNote’s syncing capabilities let you access all your references and materials from anywhere.

12. Wiley Online Library: Access Research Articles and User Resources

Here, you can access an extensive collection of books and reference resources for 48 hours on a pay-per-view basis. Many articles are available for paid download for lifetime use. It can be done without a subscription. You can find reliable user guides, training videos, and webinars through this resource.

13. Microsoft Excel: Analyze Your Research Data

One of the widely used tools for research is Microsoft Excel. MS Excel has plenty of features that will be useful when doing a research project. Excel is a must-have research tool if your study involves a lot of quantitative analysis. Excel offers a wide range of statistical functions, such as AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, SUM, etc., that you can apply to the cells with a few clicks.

You can visualize your data using various chart types, such as bar and scatter plots. You can use pivot tables to organize and quickly generate data summaries. You can use the Data Analysis ToolPak Excel add-in for complex statistical analysis. This add-in comes with various statistical analysis tools, such as Descriptive statistics, Histograms, F-tests, Random number generation, and Fourier analysis.

14. Stata: Use Software for Statistical Analysis

Stata is more functional than SPSS but simpler than R. Detailed user guides and valuable information on forums can help you resolve almost any issue. This paid software is available for any platform. It is user-friendly and easily automated.

15. ERIC: Access Education Research Papers for Free

Education Resources and Information Center (ERIC) is an online database of a wide range of academic materials and gray literature from both journal and non-journal sources, including research reports, journal articles, dissertations/theses, books, opinion papers, speeches, meeting papers, collected works, reference materials, guides, surveys, and many more.

The United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences sponsors ERIC. Access to ERIC is free and does not require any membership or subscription.

Complete Step-by-Step Guide On How To Use Unriddle's AI Research Tool

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to use Unriddle. I’ve also copied it below :)

From here, it's pretty simple.

Unriddle helps you read, write and learn faster.

Interact with documents via AI so you can quickly find and understand info.

Then start writing in a new Note and Unriddle will show you relevant content from your library as you type.

Get started by uploading a document.

Or read on for the full rundown.

Interact with documents

When you upload a document, Unriddle generates an AI assistant on top of this data.

Click 'New' in the right sidebar and then select 'Upload' to get started.

Use this assistant to answer specific questions about the text, summarize content and simplify jargon.

The trick is to be super clear about what you want.

If you're summarizing a research paper, for example, instead of saying “Summarize” or “Summarize this research paper”, say something like “Explain this research paper to me in simple terms. What method did the researchers use? What did they find? Why does it matter?”.

The second prompt will produce a much better overview of the paper because we're giving the AI more hints about what we want.

Automatic relations

Unriddle grasps the context behind each Note and Document in your library and automatically links them based on meaning.

Let's say you have a collection of nuclear physics papers in your library.

When you start writing a note about The Manhattan Project, simply mentioning "The Manhattan Project" will prompt Unriddle to find the connection between this note and the nuclear physics papers.

Even if you didn't explicitly mention the research papers, Unriddle's knowledge of Oppenheimer, his work, and the significant relevance of these papers means it understands the connection and automatically links them together.

In short, Unriddle shows you relevant content from your library at the exact moment you need it, even if you haven't explicitly mentioned it.

Citing your sources

Writing is hard when you have a ton of sources to track.

So we made it easy.

Highlight some text, click ‘Cite’ and you’ll see items from your library that contain information related to the selection of text you just highlighted as determined by our AI.

When you select an item Unriddle inserts a link into highlighted text that, when clicked, takes you to the referenced item.

Writing with AI

Click ‘New’ in the sidebar and hit ‘Note’ to open up a new note.

Here you’ll find all the text formatting options you’re used to and more.

Type ‘++’ to generate text based on the context of what’s already written.

Highlight text and click ‘Ask AI’ to open up the AI menu where you’ll find options to improve, expand, summarize and explain.

You can type custom prompts too!

Finally, you can open any note in a pane on the right side of the screen while interacting with documents. Just click the orange pencil icon at the top of the chat window.

Adjust the model, temperature and response length in the Setting sidebar.

Click the cog icon in the top right corner of the screen and look for "Chat Settings".

These apply across all documents but you can easily flip between them regardless of settings at the time of upload.

Model: the machine learning model used to generate responses.

Temperature: the amount of creative license you give to the AI.

Max length: the maximum number of words generated in a response.

Got feedback or questions? Send us an email and we'll get back to you within a day.

— Naveed

Importance of Research For Students

Research is an integral part of education that helps students become smart, independent thinkers. When students research, they explore and learn new information about a topic that interests them.

This investigation process helps students develop essential skills that will benefit them in school and throughout their lives. Whether writing a simple paper for class or working on a dissertation or thesis, research allows students to learn about a subject of interest and contribute to the larger academic community.

Research Improves Knowledge and Skills

Research improves a student’s ability to learn. As students conduct research, they gather information that helps them understand a specific topic or subject. This process builds knowledge and helps students develop skills that will aid them in future learning.

Read Faster & Write Better With Unriddle for Free Today

Unriddle is a research software that helps you read faster and write better. I know what you're thinking: "Who cares? I just need to get through my next assignment." But here's the thing: the better you can research, the less time you'll waste on boring assignments.

Unriddle allows you to quickly find info in documents, simplify complex topics, take notes, and write with the power of AI. Thousands of researchers and students trust Unriddle to help them ace their work. Unriddle generates an AI assistant on top of any document so you can quickly find, summarize, and understand info.

Unriddle AI understands the meaning behind your writing and automatically links you to relevant things you’ve read and written about. Highlight text and Unriddle AI will show you the most relevant sources from your library using AI. Never lose a citation again. Generate text with AI autocomplete to improve and expand your writing, with suggestions based on the context of your work. Step into a collaborative workspace where everyone can contribute and chat with the same documents in real-time and much more!

Read faster & write better — try Unriddle for free today.