PhD resources
February 02, 2022
This is a non-exhaustive list of what I needed during my PhD. Note that I am a PhD student in Physics and so our needs could differ, but I hope this could help some of you!
The first and most important resource that I can give you if you don't already have it is to use SciHub. It allows you to read most articles online without having to pay for them!
The first and most important resource that I can give you if you don't already have it is to use SciHub. It allows you to read most articles online without having to pay for them!
Social Network
- Twitter is the best platform to share your work in my opinion. You could ask your group and university to share it too in order to increase the visibility of your article.
- Linkedin is a good platform to share your work, even if it is more used by industry than academia.
You could also build a website, in this case I can recommend that you use:
- Owlstown, this is what I used to build this website. Easy to use and some features for PhD/Scientists are already implemented!
- WordPress, if you want a fully customizable website, but harder to use.
Digital identity and Metrics
- Google Scholar is really popular to search for articles, to get a digital identity, and to get your number of citations, h index...
- Orcid is really important for your digital identity. It is even mandatory to publish in some journals.
- Researchgate is good to search for articles, you can even ask the authors to send you the full article! It can also work as a digital identity.
- Publons is used as a digital identity and metric (number of citations of your articles on Web of Science).
- Scopus is the same as Publons. I think it is more used in the USA while Publons is more used in Europe but I'm not sure.
Academic Skills
- Some tips to improve your academic writing, and here too!
- Some tips on how to improve your cold mail skills can be found on this Twitter account. It really helped me more than I thought!
- How to write an academic CV (scientifically proven!), and here too!
- You will probably have to write using LaTeX. In this case I can recommend Overleaf, a web-based collaborative LaTeX editor.
- For your bibliography, you can do everything yourself, or get a Reference Manager! The most well-known are Zotero, Mendeley, and Endnote, but I am currently using Paperpile!
- Good resource to understand Peer Review!