Reference
Resources
Everything mentioned across the topics, in one place. All free, or free enough.
Focus and timing
Pomofocus
Free customisable pomodoro timer with a task list attached. The best solo default.
Chrono Thèsez-vous
Collective pomodoros with people around the world (French). A decent substitute for a room.
Jardin Thèsez-vous
A pomodoro counter that grows a garden — useful for seeing that you did, in fact, do some work (French).
The WAGademy timer
The one from the room: three pomodoros, breaks and a report-back, on one screen.
Writing with other people
Shut Up & Write!
A nonprofit running free writing sessions in 80+ countries since 2007, in person and online. Same loop: state your goal, write in silence, check in. Nobody critiques anything.
Shut Up & Write — find a session
In cafés, libraries and online. Worth checking before you go to the trouble of starting a group.
Shut Up & Write — become an organiser
"You don't need experience. You need a café and a time slot." Under two hours a week, and you get their network behind you.
Thèsez-vous
Structured writing retreats and a large library of resources on academic writing (French).
The WAGademy goal board
Three columns and a pile of stickies. Write the goal, drag it to Done, saved in your browser.
Run your own WAG
The run sheet, the ground rules, and what to do in the first ten minutes.
Writing craft
Literature
Zotero
Free, open-source reference manager. Install it on day one, not on the bad day.
Connected Papers
Visual graph of papers related to a seed paper. Five free graphs a month.
SciSpace
AI-assisted literature exploration. Useful for orientation — verify everything against the paper.
Research Rabbit
Citation-graph exploration with alerts for new related work. Free.
Reproducible research
The Turing Way
The friendliest handbook on reproducible research there is. Free and open.
The Good Research Code Handbook
Project structure, documentation and testing, written for researchers.
Software Carpentry lessons
Free, well-tested lessons on the shell, Git, R and Python.
GitHub Student Developer Pack
Free private repositories and a pile of other tools, for students.
GitHub Desktop
Git with buttons instead of commands. A completely legitimate way to work.
Impact and profile
ORCID
A free, permanent researcher ID that survives name changes and job moves. Fifteen minutes, once, forever.
DORA
The Declaration on Research Assessment: stop using journal metrics to judge individual papers and people. Worth being able to cite by name.
The Leiden Manifesto
Ten principles for using research metrics responsibly. Two pages, published in Nature in 2015.
CRediT contributor roles
The 14 roles for describing who did what on a paper. Agree them before submission, not after.
UQ Library — research impact evidence
What counts as evidence of impact, organised by type. The most useful page on this list if you are at UQ.
UQ Library — metrics for grants and promotions
Which numbers to quote, and how, for ARC and NHMRC applications.
Altmetric
Tracks news, policy documents and clinical guidelines mentioning a paper. Treat the score as noise and the policy citations as gold.
Zenodo
Free DOIs for code, data, slides and posters — so the outputs that are not papers can still be cited.