Tool of the Week: LaTeX

Posted on by mrsoltys
Think of LaTeX as the nerdiest word processor you'll ever see. LaTeX focuses on content, and does all the formatting for you (kind-of).  The end result is beautifuly typset documents based on style sheets with auto labeled equations, figures, and tables. I love using LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX to automatically format my citations and build my bibliography based on the citations I've used...Read More

Tool of the Week: Web of Knowledge

Posted on by mrsoltys
Research can be a real pain.  I've already given a tool to keep track of where you've been, but sometimes it seems hard to know where to go. Web of Knowledge is not only a useful tool for searching through loads of journal articles, but it has really useful citation linking.  Once you find a relevant article can search backwards...Read More

Tool of The Week: VPN

Posted on by mrsoltys
Sometimes you want the privlidges you get when you're on campus computers, but you don't want to be on campus.  Maybe you're working from home, your favorite coffee shop, or on the road.  VPNs allow your computer to appear to have the IP address of another network.  This means is you get the benefits that you normally get on campus, from anywhere....Read More

Tool of the Week: Using RSS to monitor news, craigslist, and journal articles

Posted on by mrsoltys
RSS is a way to subscribe to updates to websites.  So, weather there are a couple of blogs you follow, you want to stay on top of current news headlines on a certain subject, or you just want to stay on top of whenever someone posts a new bike in your size to craigslist, RSS is for you. The first step is...Read More

Tool of the Week: Mendeley

Posted on by mrsoltys
Mendeley is a program that sorts and organizes PDFs, allowing you to easily keep track of papers you've read.  Mendeley allows you to highlight and take notes on your PDFs, and all of your notes (as well as the full text of PDFs) are searchable... so you can quit saying "I read a paper somewhere..." and find exactly where it...Read More