Belmont Abbey College Library: Library Research: Research Tools

Tools for Research

Getting Started

GALE Topic Finder
CREDO Mind Map
SIRS Issues Researcher
Research the pros and cons of current issues and enduring social issues through full-text articles, multimedia, primary sources, government documents, and reference materials.
ProQuest Research Companion

Grammar Editors

Presentation Tools

Prezi
Kizoa
Canva
Brittanica ImageQuest
Britannica ImageQuest brings lesson plans, assignments and projects to life with over three million rights-cleared images from 62 leading collections.

Citation Management

Zotero
Free plug-in that allows you to store and organize citations as you find them on your personal computer. Also allows you to create bibliographies in 20+ styles.
Mendeley
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research
BibMe
Free citation builder for MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian. Can save or download bibliographies into Word.

Encyclopedias & Other Tertiary Sources

Annual Reviews
46 disciplines including science, social science, law, medicine, and economics. Annual Review articles hold a unique place in the scholarly communication ecosystem because they transfer expert knowledge synthesized from the exponentially expanding corpus of scientific literature to scholars and society.
Biography Reference Center
Biography Reference Center offers a comprehensive collection of more than 450,000 full-text biographies, including the complete full text run of Biography Today and Biography magazine, as well as thousands of narrative biographies that are not available in other databases.
Britannica Academic
Compare Countries, search the World Atlas, perform statistical comparisons between countries or changes over time, find pictures and video, and of course, find encyclopedia entries on people, places, things, and actions
CQ Press Library
The place to search or browse resources on American government, current affairs, history, politics, public policy, and data analysis for the social sciences.
CREDO Reference
An extensive cross-searchable collection of online reference works, primarily dictionaries and encyclopedias, across all subject areas.
Gale Ebooks
Oxford Reference
Routledge Handbooks
Routledge Philosophy Companions and Handbooks provide systematic, authoritative overviews of core subjects and topics in philosophy, edited by leading philosophers in the field and including international rosters of contributors.
Salem Press
Testing, Education, and Research Center
A testing and education preparation resource that includes in-depth information on college, graduate, and professional programs, professional training, scholarships, and entrance tests alongside practice tests for entrance exams, certifications, and licensing exams.

Reference Databases

CREDO Reference This link opens in a new window
A great place to start research. A premier virtual reference collection including encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, images, audio files, and videos in a wide expanse of subject areas.
MasterFILE Reference eBook Collection This link opens in a new window
1,700 full-text periodicals covering general reference, business, health, education, general science, multicultural issues full text more than 500 reference books, over 107,000 primary source documents and an Image Collection of over 510,000 photos, maps & flags.
Oxford Reference This link opens in a new window
In-depth, specialized titles from Oxford University Press award-winning Encyclopedias, Companions, and a selection of partner publishers scholarly works.
Routledge Handbooks Online This link opens in a new window
Routledge Handbooks Online is an invaluable educational resource bringing together the worlds leading scholars to provide a cutting-edge overview of classic and current research from Routledge.
Salem Press This link opens in a new window
This database holds the electronic versions of our Salem Press reference materials.
Writer's Reference Center This link opens in a new window
Writers Reference Center provides users with a convenient one-stop location for all of the tools necessary to write and research effectively

Bibliometrics Tools & Software

BibExcel
BibExcel is designed to assist in analysis of bibliographic data. This tool-box can generate data files that can be imported to Excel, or any program that takes tabbed data records, for further processing .Bibexcel is a free-ware for academic non-profit use.
CiteSpace
CiteSpace is a freely available Java application for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature.
Netdraw
A free, Windows program for visualizing social network data.
Pajek
Pajek is an open source Windows program for analysis and visualization of large networks.
Sci2
The Science of Science (Sci2) Tool is a modular toolset specifically designed for the study of science. It supports the temporal, geospatial, topical, and network analysis and visualization of scholarly datasets at the micro (individual), meso (local), and macro (global) levels.
PoP (Publish or Perish)
Publish or Perish calculates citation metrics from data in Google Scholar. Free.
RStudio
This free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R.
SITKIS
Sitkis is a free bibliometric tool that works on Java and MS Access
UCInet
This is a software package for the analysis of social network data and comes with the NetDraw network visualization tool. The program can be downloaded and used for free for 90 days. Thereafter, the program will need to be individually purchased.
VOSviewer
This is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks such as journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature.

AI Tools

Grammarly is partnered with Belmont Abbey College and can be used to spot grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and punctuation issues while refining clarity and enhancing your writing style.

Research Rabbit is a citation-based mapping tool that finds relationships between research works. It uses visualizations to help researchers find similar papers and other researchers in their field.

LanguageTool is an AI-based grammar checker. Paste your text or start typing to check grammatical errors and spelling mistakes across languages.

Elicit finds papers relevant to your topic by searching through papers and citations and extracting and synthesizing key information.

Perplexity is a search engine that provides AI-generated answers, including citations linked above the summaries.

Scholarcy summarizes key points and arguments of articles into summary cards that researchers can read, share, and annotate when compiling research on a given topic.