Research on The Augmented Scholar

ChatGPT — AI Research Assistant

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ChatGPT for Researchers — What It’s Actually Good For

ChatGPT is the entry point for most researchers into AI-assisted work. The key is knowing which tasks it handles well and where it fails.

Perplexity AI — AI-Powered Search for Researchers

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Perplexity Beats Google for Research Exploration

Standard search engines give you a list of links to click through. Perplexity reads those sources and synthesises a direct answer with numbered citations you can verify in one click.

Paperpile — Reference Manager for Google Workspace

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paperpile — When It Beats Zotero

Paperpile is a paid reference manager ($3/month) that integrates deeply with Google Chrome and Google Docs. If your entire research workflow runs in Google Workspace, it’s worth considering over Zotero.

Git and GitHub for Researchers: Version Control Your Work Without Fear

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve lost work before. A hard drive failure, a file accidentally overwritten, a script that worked yesterday that doesn’t today and you have no idea what changed.

Git solves all of these. It’s a version control system — a way of saving the full history of changes to files so you can always go back, identify what changed, and collaborate without conflicts.