SciTools

Useful tools and resources for your scientific research.

Literature and note-taking

• Zotero. Reference manager. Get all your papers in one place.
• Inciteful. Paste a DOI and find related papers, using cross citations.
• Research Rabbit. Upload a BibTeX or connect to your Zotero account, and find papers related to your collection.
• Obsidian. Note-taking app in markdown format, with cross-references. (Note that this page was creted with Obsidian!)

Documents and graphs

• WebPlotDigitizer. Extract numerical data from plotted images.
• Pix2Tex. Write LaTeX equations by uploading a screenshot.
• Detextify. Find that weird LaTeX symbol.
• Tables Generator. Create tables in different formats: LaTeX, markdown…
• Draw.io. Create nice diagrams and flowcharts.

File managing tools

• Git. Please use a version tracker for your code. Please.
• FreeFileSync. Sync backups of entire folders with the click of a button.
• TorrentTrackers. Selection of nice torrent trackers, to share big files such as large computational outputs.

Solid-state physics software

• QuantumESPRESSO resources
• CASTEP resources
• ASE resources
• cif2cell resources
• Wikipedia’s DFT software comparison: List of quantum chemistry and solid-state physics software
• Wikipedia’s Molecular Dynamics software comparison: Comparison of software for molecular mechanics modeling

Databases

• StructuralDB. Comprehensive list of relevant material databases, useful to find structural files to simulate your materials

Chemistry tools

• PTable. Periodic Table
• IUPAC Periodic Table of the Elements and Isotopes
• ACS Solvent selection tool

Scientific illustrations

• NIH Bioart CC license
• Chemix !!! Atribution required unless suscribed
• BioRender !!! Suscription required for publishing
• SciDraw !!! CC-BY
• Bioicons !!! Check licensing

LLM tools

Warning: AI should not replace your own intelligence. It is just text completion. It might be useful eg. for coding, but you must be the one designing the code, otherwise it will create stupid routines leading nowhere, etc.

• Github Copilot. VSCode plugin that helps you write code, free with the university account. It also adds a chat window to get coding insights.
• Elicit. Ask a Question, get summarized results from papers.
• Deepl Write. Check your grammar or translate, really useful even for scientific texts.
• HuggingChat. Open source LLMs
• Microsoft Copilot
• Google Gemini
• ChatGPT

Other GitHub repositories

• SciTools. Links, tutorials and resources for all your scientific endeavours (this page).
• Aton. Python package with powerful and comprehensive tools for cutting-edge materials research, focused on (but not limited to) neutron science. It provides a range of spectral analysis tools and physico-chemical constants. It also also allows you to easily create, edit and analyse all kinds of text files, with a special focus on ab-initio calculations.
• PlantillaLatex. LaTeX template, with info and description of useful commands.

Contact

Pablo Gila-Herranz, pgila001@ikasle.ehu.eus
PhD Student @ Quantum Beams & Computation for Sustainable Materials Group
Materials Physics Center CFM-MPC (CSIC-UPV)

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Last updated on 2025-02-04