guides

The reference manager I would personally recommend to everyone is Zotero. It's free, open source, and highly customizable. In this post I'll give a basic overview on how to install and use zotero, including a PDF with a step-by-step guide, and links to add-ons you can install.

When you're doing a structured literature search chances are you're using one of the main commercial scholarly search engines like Scopus, "Web of Science", or Google Scholar. These tools are often expensive, and often not intuitive to use. Unfortunately, you didn't have much of a choice in the past.

Recently free and open alternatives have been catching up with these juggernauts. Not just databases like OpenAlex or Crossref, but also structured search engines like Semantic Scholar or the topic of this post: The Lens.

Most people are used to finding literature by doing keyword searches on platforms like Scopus or Google Scholar. However, there are lots of other ways to find scholarly works. For example, you can use your current bibliography's citations and references to find more related works. Let's dive into my favorite example: inciteful.xyz.