Wetlab on The Augmented Scholar

Inkscape — Free Vector Editor for Scientific Figures

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Inkscape is

Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics editor. Its native format is SVG — an open W3C standard — and it does professionally what commercial vector editors do: precise shapes, paths, typography, layers, and export to every format a journal accepts.

Zotero — Free Reference Manager for Researchers

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Zotero is

Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager that captures papers from your browser, stores their metadata and PDFs, and inserts formatted citations into whatever you write in. It is built by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, a non-profit that grew out of the Roy Rosenzweig Center at George Mason University.

Obsidian — Markdown Notes You Own Forever

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Obsidian is

Obsidian is a note-taking application that operates directly on a folder of Markdown files — a “vault” — on your own disk. Notes link to each other with [[wiki-style]] brackets, and the app builds a navigable graph of those connections. Everything beyond the basics comes from a large community plugin ecosystem.

Matplotlib — Publication-Quality Figures in Python

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Matplotlib is

Matplotlib is the foundational plotting library for Python. Nearly every other Python visualisation tool — Seaborn, pandas’ plotting methods, much of scikit-learn’s diagnostic output — is built on top of it, which means learning Matplotlib is learning the layer underneath most of the ecosystem.

Overleaf — Collaborative LaTeX in Your Browser

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Overleaf is

Overleaf is a browser-based LaTeX editor. You write in a text pane, the PDF compiles on Overleaf’s servers and appears beside it, and collaborators open the same project through a link and edit simultaneously.

Elicit — AI Literature Review and Data Extraction

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Elicit is

Elicit is an AI research assistant purpose-built for literature work. You ask a research question in plain language; it retrieves real papers from a large academic corpus, and — the part that distinguishes it — extracts structured fields from each one into a table you can compare across: sample size, population, intervention, outcome measure, limitations.

ChatGPT — AI Assistant for Researchers, Reviewed

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

What ChatGPT is

ChatGPT is OpenAI’s conversational AI assistant, and for most researchers it is the tool that made the whole category real. It drafts and rewrites text, explains concepts at whatever level you ask for, generates and debugs code, and — on paid tiers — runs Python in a sandbox against files you upload.

Perplexity — AI Search With Citations, Reviewed

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

What Perplexity is

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine. You ask a question in ordinary language; it runs web searches, reads the results, and writes a synthesised answer with numbered citations back to the pages it used.

Research Rabbit — Free Paper Discovery and Mapping

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Research Rabbit is

Research Rabbit is a free literature discovery tool. You add papers you already know into a collection; it suggests related work, papers that cite them, papers they cite, and other authors working in the same space — and every paper you add refines what it suggests next.

Connected Papers — Visual Citation Map Tool

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Connected Papers is

Connected Papers is a web tool that takes one paper — a DOI, a title, an arXiv ID — and draws a graph of the papers most similar to it. Nodes are papers, size reflects citation count, colour reflects publication year, and proximity reflects similarity.

Jupyter — Interactive Notebooks for Data Analysis

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Jupyter is

A Jupyter notebook is a document containing executable code cells and Markdown prose cells, interleaved, with each cell’s output — numbers, tables, plots — displayed inline beneath it. JupyterLab is the modern interface: a file browser, terminal, editor, and several notebooks side by side.

RStudio — The IDE for Statistical Research in R

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What RStudio is

RStudio, now developed by Posit, is the integrated development environment for R. The layout has barely changed in a decade and does not need to: a script editor, a console, an environment pane listing every object currently in memory, and a plot pane showing your most recent figure.

Grammarly — Proofreading for Academic Writing

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Grammarly is

Grammarly is a writing assistant that checks grammar, punctuation, clarity, and tone. It runs as a browser extension that activates in essentially any text field, as a desktop application integrating with Word and Outlook, and as a mobile keyboard.

Canva — Conference Posters and Slides, Fast

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Canva is

Canva is a browser-based graphic design tool built around templates. You pick a layout, replace the placeholder text and images, and get something that looks professionally designed without having made any design decisions yourself.

diagrams.net — Free Flowcharts and PRISMA Diagrams

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What diagrams.net is

diagrams.net — still widely called draw.io, and still using that extension — is a free diagramming application for flowcharts, structured diagrams, and anything built from shapes connected by lines. It runs in a browser or as a desktop application, and files save wherever you tell them to: local disk, Google Drive, OneDrive, or a Git repository.

Paperpile — Reference Manager for Google Docs

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

What Paperpile is

Paperpile is a paid reference manager that runs in the browser and stores your PDFs in your own Google Drive. It captures references from journal pages, organises them into folders and labels, and inserts citations into Google Docs, Word, or a .bib file for LaTeX.

Pandoc — Convert Markdown, LaTeX, Word, and PDF

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Pandoc is

Pandoc is a command-line document converter. It reads Markdown, LaTeX, Word, HTML, reStructuredText, Jupyter notebooks, and a long list of others, and writes to an equally long list — including PDF via a LaTeX engine.

Mendeley — Elsevier's Reference Manager, Reviewed