There are a number of online research skills that help students complete various assignments, from conducting research to building a website to preparing for an exam. Researching is one of the most frequently assigned tasks in schools, and spelling and other language arts classes often give students writing prompts based on online research.
Today, the Internet is a major source for helping students learn how to conduct online research. This article explains a few research skills and techniques which will be useful for students when conducting online research.
Todoist
Research is a time-intensive activity, which means you will need a tool to organize both your professional and personal life. We advise you to give Todoist a shot. Todoist enables you to manage all of your projects and access them from any platform you own, including your desktop computer, laptop, or portable devices. You can share your tasks and collaborate with other people. Another clever feature is “karma” points, which are given to users if they are successful in assigning tasks to projects.
Google Trends
Google Trends can help to analyse search volumes and trends for different regions and periods of time. Simply choose the key words that you want to analyse and enter them into the search field. The horizontal axis of the graph indicates time, while the vertical axis indicates how frequently the word has been searched for globally. Google Trends provides statistics from 2004 through to the present date.
EndNote
EndNote is a multi-functional research tool which helps you search for information in online databases and full texts based on abstracts, as well as manage and auto-complete all of your references. Like Todoist, EndNote also enables you to share your research data with your collaborators. If you prefer to work alone, you can do that too by saving, managing and tagging your research results for better access. Other features include bibliography maker that is capable of creating citations in over 6,000 styles, as well as automatic journal suggestion.
Google Key Word Planner
The objective of this tool is to help us to identify the most frequently used key words and establish their search volume. We can also filter the search area and language. This tool can help in finding new ideas for the key words of your business, website, etc.
EduGeeksClub
Every once in a while, you are going to come across an insurmountable obstacle while doing your research. Instead of giving up, you can turn to EduGeeksClub for professional research help. Get in touch with professional writers and researchers and learn all the ins and outs of thorough research. Also, you can commission a paper from them which you can then use as a resource for your essay, paper, or dissertation. They also provide editing and proofreading services.
Semrush
This is one of our favourite online tools because it allows us to research the key words used by our competitors, as well as who is using Google Adwords and the links that redirect to their website. Apart from researching key words it also performs domain analysis.
Zotero
Another essential tool all online learners should make use of is Zotero. Zotero integrates itself seamlessly into your browser and uses its clever ability to automatically recognize content for you. After that, all it takes for you to save it to your personal, fully searchable library, which is another feature in Zotero, in a single click. It supports audio and video files, PDF documents, as well as most image formats.
Monitoring tools
There are many monitoring tools that allow you to gather information about the key words that we have selected. This includes, for example, the brand, the competitor’s brand, the key words for a market sector, etc. The results provided by the tool make it possible to identify different types of data such as the number of comments on a specific social network, and the people who most frequently mention a particular key word, etc.
Once of the most interesting social media monitoring and analytics tools available on the market is Brandchats. This platform will help you to identify and analyse your brand presence and its competition throughout the network (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).
RefWorks
RefWorks is a browser-based tool which has the ability to help learners find the right research data, organize it, store it, and easily share it with their colleagues and collaborators. All of that research information and written work needs to be supported by proper citations, and RefWorks generates those for you automatically, as well as bibliographies in every style. If you are not sure how to make use of its full potential, there are plenty of tutorials on how to do it, right there on the website.
DeepDyve
High-quality research papers and scholarly journals can often set you back a pretty penny, so it’s important for you to know exactly what you’re getting for the money you’ve paid. The only trouble is, you are often allowed to look at an abstract for free, and decide if you want to buy the full-text paper, and then realize it’s of no use to you. DeepDyve enables you to access the full-text articles for a limited period of time, enough for you to figure out if the paper is exactly what you are looking for.
ContentMine
ContentMine is an online resource which aims to bring over 100,000,000 scientific facts close to the people, by converting the collective knowledge of the world that is present in scientific literature into content which can be read on your computes. All of its tools, features, and services are free and open access. They often cite Wikipedia and similar open projects as a source of their inspiration.
Plagiarism Checker
In order to rid your work of duplicate content, run it through Plagiarism Checker, which will scan and determine if there is any duplicate content present. If there is, you either need to provide better citations, or rewrite your work so that it’s more unique.
Moz
This software makes it possible to establish where the competition is positioned on the internet, and understand the title, description H1, H2 and authority of the page and domain.
It is very important to implement these online market study or research techniques for our business, since they offer a significant competitive advantage, helping us to anticipate the needs of the market. Combining technological tools with consumer opinion will provide valuable information allowing you to implement a successful digital strategy and provide a favourable outcome for your business.
DataElixir
One of the best ways to keep up to date with all the latest news, developments and data in science is to find a website which curates all of those on a weekly basis. We recommend Data Elixir. Whether you’re an eLearner, a scientist, or a researcher, you benefit a lot for its weekly collection of all the best data resources and news, and you don’t even have to put in any effort whatsoever. You just have to subscribe to their free weekly newsletter and that’s it.
Conclusion:
With so many online research tools available, it can be hard to know which one is right for you. And for someone new to research skills, conducting basic online searches can be daunting. But it doesn’t have to be! The basic skills of searching, evaluating and organizing research are the same no matter what online tool you use–and it’s our job to help you figure that all out.