15 Best Research Tools for Students

Feeling stuck on your next paper or overwhelmed by research? I’ve been there—grades matter, and the pressure is real. That’s why smart tools can make all the difference.

In this blog, I’ll share the best research tools to help you write faster, think clearer, and stay organized. One standout is Anara, an AI research assistant that helps you find, summarize, and structure information in minutes.

Check out the AI-powered research tools for students on this list and see which ones are most likely to boost your confidence—and your results!

1. Anara (formerly Unriddle AI)

Anara is an AI research tool for students and academics designed to help them work smarter, not harder. Instead of spending hours digging through dense PDFs or scattered sources, Anara lets you upload documents, ask questions in plain language, and get summaries or structured answers with citations to sources.

Best features

• Source-based answers: All responses come directly from your uploaded documents, reducing AI hallucinations and boosting accuracy.
• Clickable citations: Every answer includes citations that link to the exact spot in the source—whether it's a PDF or video.
• Video support: Upload lecture recordings or educational videos and chat with the content like you would a textbook.
• Knowledge graph: Automatically connects ideas across your notes and documents, helping you spot patterns and connections over time.
• Smart paper finder: Highlight text in your writing and click “Find citations” to discover related academic papers instantly.
• Citation generator: Get perfectly formatted citations (APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago) in just one click.
• OCR for scans and handwriting: Works with poorly scanned or handwritten documents using advanced OCR.
• Info grouping: Combine multiple sources into one chat and create nested groups for better organization.
• Natural language search: Ask questions like “What was that paper on microbiology?” and Anara will find and link it for you.
• Real-time collaboration: Work with classmates on the same documents or research sources simultaneously.
• Auto metadata extraction: Anara pulls out key details like title, author, abstract, and publication info for all uploaded documents.

Sign up for free today and see how much faster and smarter research can be!

Pricing

Anara offers flexible plans for every student:

• Free Plan – €0/month
  Get started with 1,000 AI words/day, 5 uploads/day, and 1 recording/day—no credit card needed.
• Pro Plan – €11/month (billed yearly)
  Unlock unlimited AI words, uploads, and recordings. Plus, access premium AI models like GPT-4.1 and Claude 3.5.
• Team Plan – €17/seat/month (billed yearly)
  Ideal for study groups or research teams. Includes shared workspaces, collaborative editing, and admin controls.

Still using ChatGPT for academic writing?! Check a better alternative!

2. MyBib

MyBib is a free bibliography and citation generator. It allows you to generate formatted bibliographies, citations and works cited from various sources, including websites, books, journals, videos, blog posts, book chapters, conference papers, reports, journal articles, images, theses, ebooks, encyclopedia entries, movies, personal communications, maps, dictionary entries, and many more.

MyBib supports hundreds of citation styles, including APA 6 and 7, Chicago, Harvard and Harvard (Australia), MLA 8, and MLA 9., among others. Using MyBib will enable you to quickly build and add your bibliography to your academic papers and assignments. MyBib also allows you to export citations to other citation managers such as Mendeley and Zotero.

3. Zotero

Zotero helps you collect all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes.

4. LucidChart

Lucidchart is an excellent instrument based on infographics. This software's diagrams help understand people’s behavior, data, and processes. The visualization allows to find out the interdependence between different phenomena. If you have a large bulk of information to process before generating a topic, this should be your choice.

5. Google Scholar

The same company that produced the world’s top search engine also offers the world’s top scholarly search engine. Google Scholar works just like Google. But it directly links you to publications in countless academic journals. When using the system, look at the right-hand side of the search results. Then, Google Scholar shows you if a PDF is available for each article.

6. Scopus

Scopus is a bibliographical base used by over five thousand academic, governmental, and corporate establishments. It searches through about 75 million entries, including 194’000 books. You can search by author, document title, or affiliation. It shows the citation rate of almost any article from any discipline. The tool also suggests similar documents by related references, which could accelerate your research.

7. JSTOR

This database searches for books, primary sources, and journals. It provides free access to open community collections of museums, public libraries, and archives. Due to the COVID-19 displacement of students, the resource has a special offer for free use of unlicensed materials. Still, only the participating educational institutions are eligible. You can share your lists with other users if you wish.

8. Obsidian

Obsidian Notes is a note-taking app that can also be used as an editor or knowledge base. You can use it to take notes in classes, keep track of your research for papers, or organize anything else you want to keep track of. You can create new pages from scratch or import text from other files. It’s easy to organize your notes with tags and folders to keep everything tidy.

Obsidian’s biggest strength is its flexibility. You can make it as straightforward or as complicated as you want. You can customize the look and feel of the app with themes and change its behavior with plugins. If you’re easily distracted, there’s even a mode that hides everything but the text on the page: no menus, no buttons, only words.

9. ResearchGate

ResearchGate provides more than 135 million publication pages. The tool is an excellent solution for keeping up with the latest research news. It allows you to share your research with peers, collaborate with them across continents, and ask for expert support. You can also track how many people have read or referenced your work.

10. Science Direct

ScienceDirect focuses on medical, technical, engineering, and scientific research, but humanities are also covered. It provides access to foundational and theoretic materials and the latest findings. You can search by keywords, author, title of book or journal, volume, issue, and page. All the literature is peer-reviewed and can be trusted.

11. EndNote

Endnote gives you the tools to search, organize, and share your research. It allows you to easily create bibliographies while writing your following paper with features like Cite While You Write. Maximize your time with features like finding full text for your references and automatically updating records. Whether on your desktop, online, or iPad, EndNote’s syncing capabilities let you access all your references and materials from anywhere.

12. Wiley Online Library

Here, you can access an extensive collection of books and reference resources for 48 hours on a pay-per-view basis. Many articles are available for paid download for lifetime use. It can be done without a subscription. You can find reliable user guides, training videos, and webinars through this resource.

13. Microsoft Excel

One of the widely used tools for research is Microsoft Excel. MS Excel has plenty of features that will be useful when doing a research project. Excel is a must-have research tool if your study involves a lot of quantitative analysis. Excel offers a wide range of statistical functions, such as AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, SUM, etc., that you can apply to the cells with a few clicks.

You can visualize your data using various chart types, such as bar and scatter plots. You can use pivot tables to organize and quickly generate data summaries. You can use the Data Analysis ToolPak Excel add-in for complex statistical analysis. This add-in comes with various statistical analysis tools, such as Descriptive statistics, Histograms, F-tests, Random number generation, and Fourier analysis.

14. Stata

Stata is more functional than SPSS but simpler than R. Detailed user guides and valuable information on forums can help you resolve almost any issue. This paid software is available for any platform. It is user-friendly and easily automated.

15. ERIC

Education Resources and Information Center (ERIC) is an online database of a wide range of academic materials and gray literature from both journal and non-journal sources, including research reports, journal articles, dissertations/theses, books, opinion papers, speeches, meeting papers, collected works, reference materials, guides, surveys, and many more.

The United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences sponsors ERIC. Access to ERIC is free and does not require any membership or subscription.