Source: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-tools-every-PhD-student-should-use

What are some tools every PhD student should use?

17 Answers

Trung, Ph.D student from Paris-Sud 11 University

Updated Jul 11, 2019

1. For saving all your work and materials: Think about using a cloud-based app like Dropbox (has the best synchronization ability IMHO), Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, or Box (I’ve been using it since ~2006), etc. Trust me they will save you a life when one day your PC is broken or you accidentally format your hard disk.
2. For managing papers: EndNote, Mendeley, JabRef, etc.
3. For editing LaTeX documents: TeXStudio, Texmaker, LyX (very friendly), etc. To easily share and collaborate on a latex document: Take a look at some cloud LaTeX services such as Overleaf or ShareLatex.
4. For drawing vectorized figures: Inkscape, Microsoft Visio (both work well with LaTeX). You can also directly use LaTeX to make figures (advanced level)
5. For making graphs from data/results: gnuplot, matplotlib (I usually use with Python), RStudio, Excel, MATLAB, etc.
6. For taking notes: Evernote, Microsoft OneNote (both have app on mobile phone)
7. For searching literature: Google Scholar, ArXiv (the largest pre-prints archive), IEEE Xplore (for engineering students), or just Google. In France we also have HaL (Hyper Articles en Ligne) which is built to promote open-access.
8. For downloading papers: (not recommended though): SciHub, Libgen, etc.
9. For reading PDFs: Mendeley is my first recommendation, you can use it for multiple purposes: organizing/reading/highlighting… papers. If you just want a fast lauching tool, try using SumatraPDF, a very light software. If you want to have more powerful tools such as commenting, adding signature… Foxit Reader is one of the best choices.
10. For merging/spliting PDFs: PDFsam
11. For viewing/editing or even compiling codes: Notepad++, Sublime Text, etc.
12. For collaborative documentation, research papers and source codes in addition to version control: Git, e.g. Github and Gitlab

P.S. Thank you for all the upvotes, I will keep this answer updated!