In my master’s degree, I am expected to write many survey papers and project reports. As one has to follow the academic rigour and cannot cite Wikipedia as a reference, All the objective claims made have to be supported by some kind of evidence already published or through the validation of experiments done in the paper.

As one has to cite many papers, especially while doing a literature survey (less intense than a Masters’s or Ph.D. thesis ), tracking and managing lots of papers becomes cumbersome. This is where Citation Management Software comes into the picture. They allow you to save and categorize the existing documents and provide useful plugins to the well-known text editors to cite in various citation styles (APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE etc.). It’s always helpful to organize papers in this software rather than manually, which is a total pain in the ass.

One of the software I found helpful is Mendely, a colleague of mine recommended to me when he saw me go through the painstaking job of doing manual citations. I have used it ever since. It’s free to use and supports most major operating systems and Word Editors. It also comes with a limited free online storage where you can sync the papers you downloaded and collaborate with your colleagues. It has the most features you need to aid you in writing a good paper.

And then there is the Legendary LaTeX and BibTeX that help you craft beautiful documents. Academic or otherwise. I have used it myself in the past and was very impressed. You can go ahead take a look at MIT Libraries page on it for more details. There is also a beginner-friendly series on getting started with LaTeX from a very good YouTuber Luke Smith, and you can check out his playlist for more details. If you are lazy like me, you can go ahead use online services like Overleaf or resumake to build quick and dirty LaTeX documents online.