ResearchPal is a new app designed especially for academic writing.
It has a built-in search engine. You can look up papers, save them to your library, and extract key insights.
It can also help you with literature review and drafting your paper.
Here's how to use it:
Go to researchpal(dot)co and sign up for a free account.
Once you have logged in, click on "Projects" and create a new project.
Open the project you just created. ResearchPal will give you a list of tools in the left taskbar.
Click on "Library" and upload papers relevant to your project. At the moment, ResearchPal only lets you upload papers one by one.
It also has Zotero and Mendeley integrations but I didn't find them very helpful. Mendeley integration didn't work for me. And it retrieved only a few articles from my Zotero library.
Maybe folks at ResearchPal will improve these integrations in the future.
ResearchPal has a built-in search function, which is really helpful.
It's like having Google Scholar inside your MS Word.
Click on "Search Papers" and type in keywords related to your project.
While the idea of a built-in search function is great, it needs some work. I looked up "world literature david damrosch" and it included irrelevant papers on neural networks.
That said, having a search function is awesome.
ResearchPal also lets you save relevant articles. Click on the "Save" button to do so.
All your saved articles and those in your library will show up in the "References" tab. This is very convenient.
Another great functionality ResearchPal provides is it lets you extract insights from papers in your library.
Select a few papers in your library and click on "Add to Paper Insights." ResearchPal will give summaries of the articles.
You can add several additional columns too like Conclusions, Results, Literature Survey, etc.
This can help you go through key insights of a lot of papers very quickly. You can use this feature to figure out papers that are most relevant to your project.
Want to learn how to supercharge your academic writing with AI apps?
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4,300+ academics including those at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are using it.
Dr Ally Louks's viral PhD thesis (130M views) on the politics of smell redefined the way people talk about smell.
Everyone wants to read her thesis, but it's unavailable until 2028
Here are 10 books on the politics of smell that you can read right now:
1. The Smell of Slavery
1. The Smell of Slavery by Andrew Kettler
Shows how white slave owners defined Black, African bodies as noxious and deserving of enslavement.
Smell was used to dehumanize Black folks who were equated with animals by white slave owners.
2. The Foul and the Fragrant by Alain Corbin
Considered a foundational text in smell studies.
Shows how the bourgeois nose associated bad smells with the poor and how deodorization became a tool for state control in 18th and 19th century France.