Tools for Physicists

The day to day tasks in research are not always glorious: reading papers, correcting exams, debugging code and preparing graphics for manuscripts. It is not like everyone is discovering something life-changing every week. It is the small things that take a lot of time and sometimes it feels like people must have come up with more clever ways to deal with these things. And the answer is: most probably someone did, but nobody ever taught it during the studies. The idea of this blog is to remedy this.

The idea of this series of posts is to present a couple of tools that I am using to make my life easier. I am not claiming that this is the best or most optimized way to deal with every given task, but some of the tools make my life considerably easier (and they might work for you as well). Not every tool is for every job and not every tool is a fit for everyone. My idea of this series is to collect a couple of useful tools and you can decide yourself whether you like them or not. Feel free to pick and choose (and don’t hold me responsible if it does not work for you).

I am a physicist by training and work currently as a postdoc in a research group in Leiden. Little surprise: the tools and programs here are geared a bit towards research in physics and natural sciences.

Without much further ado, let’s have a look at the menu

• latexdiff
• autoreload
• Bibliography Management Part I: Zotero
• Bibliography Management Part II: Zotero
• Unit testing
• Best Practices for Latex
• and more….

If you use other tools or have different use cases for the tools presented here, please contact me.