Up until now Google Scholar most popular search tool for peer reviewed articles. This might change in the coming years as a system called Semantic Scholar gains traction. Developed by the researchers of the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence under the lead of Marie Hagman the system just got another update and now includes more than 40 million papers.
It differs from systems such as Google Scholar because it is not based on citations in other papers or the rate or recurring phrases to determine the relevance of papers it uses AI and bases its results on the context of the phrases which leads to a higher accuracy.
As with most AI systems Semantic Scholar is based on a neural network that the team around Ms. Hagman trained to recognise scientific phrases and their contexts. This was done by giving it manually highlighted topics out of abstracts to develop a pattern at first and then in the second phase give it another batch of abstracts the system then recognises by itself and is afterwards corrected by Ms. Hagmans team.
So, when you start the research for your master thesis give it a try! At least it is nice to throw that buzzword out there: “I did my thesis using AI.”
However, apart from getting the right papers to base your thesis on there are a couple of other topics for which there are some useful and mainly free tools out there. Here is an overview of the most popular ones:
Citavi
Start putting your references and abstracts of papers and books into Citavi, a free reference management software and let it take care of formatting your citations and references. Plus, with the Microsoft Word Citavi plug-in it will lift your writing speed to a new level.
LaTeX
LaTeX is an open-source document preparation system that was designed for scholarly and technical writing, and is great for handling large documents. It is a powerful and highly customizable typesetting system that, in contrast to MS Word, separates the content and document design. However, it is not as straight-forward as Word but if you are lucky EUR might provide pre-set templates that match the Thesis formatting guidelines and the last couple of days you usually spend on formatting you can now spend on planning your holiday after successfully handing it in! So, if interested, maybe check out this great, detailed article on why you should use LaTeX for writing your dissertation.
Pomodoro technique
I first heard of the Pomodoro technique in the MOOC (Massive open online course) by Barbara Oakley on “Learning how to learn“. Which I recommend very much as it provides a lot insight into how to fight procrastination. The simplest and yet most effective technique is the Pomodoro. You just set a timer for a 25-minute session of work. That’s it. The timer goes off after the time and you get a short break (five minutes). After four pomodoros, you get a long break (10 minutes). You’ll be amazed at just how much you can get done in 25 minutes, and how amazing your focus is when you know you’re on a deadline, even if it’s self-imposed. So, take your phone or any other clock set a timer and there you go! And if you earned a little bit of spare time with this technique why not use it to do the MOOC or read the book (A mind for numbers) on which it is based.
Sources:
https://www.citavi.com/en/index.html
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
https://thesiswhisperer.com/2011/10/13/how-i-use-technology-in-my-phd/
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/best-software-writing-your-dissertation
Why you should LaTeX your dissertation; or, why you don’t have to write your dissertation in Word.
