Colwiz
Colwiz is a piece of software that focuses on research management, and it is entirely free to use. Students, researchers, and other academics will be able to find publications from a wide range of sources through a single interface, and it makes it easy to share those articles with others who are all working on the same project.
- Publication Search
- Mobile Research Collaboration
- Comprehensive Research Management Tools
- Easy Article Sharing
- Occasional Bugs
With colwiz, you can easily manage the research processes of your group or just yourself. The tool works as a database for academic publications that you can access through an intuitive interface. You can add publications to your personal colwiz library by searching for them through various databases, including arXiv, PubMed, and Google Scholar. You can also add physical books that you own to your library by scanning the book's ISBN bar code. Any articles or files that you add to your library can be accessed instantaneously from anywhere with this software. You can use the Groups feature of the software to engage in discussions with others who have read the articles you have shared with them or they have shared with you. This sort of group discussion can drastically improve research potential. You can also use the software to quickly browse abstracts of articles, glance at articles by keyword, and take advantage of easy link-building so nothing gets lost. If you come up with a brand new idea that you have to share, you can send messages to anyone in a group right away. If you are working primarily through your stationary desktop computer, every change you make to your Desktop Library will be synced instantly to your Web Library that you access from a mobile device. This auto-syncing helps you stay up to date on any changes made by others in your group as well, so you can stay at the forefront of the discussion with the freshest insight. Using more than 7,000 citation styles that have been included in the software via various plugins, you can reference different articles that you find in your research. For those who have never used colwiz, the software is quite easy to learn. You can start from the mobile or desktop app, and all you have to do is create an account. From there, you can start adding articles that you already have to your library so they will all be consolidated into a single location. If your system already has another similar piece of software, colwiz will import articles from those managers as well. When you write a paper using Word, Google Docs, or OpenOffice, you can take advantage of citations that have been auto-formatted into various styles by installing plugins into those word processors. The software does exhibit the occasional bug, but most of them seem to be minor and innocuous. The number of bugs and crashes gets reduced with every new update of the software.