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Scientific Support & Tools
The 7 Best Online Resources for Researchers
Top digital platforms to aid your literature reviews, protocol design, citations, and scientific illustrations.
Need help tracking down an elusive protocol, rapidly creating accurate citations, or finding stunning scientific illustrations for your upcoming presentations and publications? Check out the following curated list of essential online resources designed to streamline your daily research and enhance your scientific communication.
Cold Spring Harbor Protocols
Started in 2006, Cold Spring Harbor Protocols has published hundreds of free, easy-to-use laboratory protocols ranging heavily from robust antibody purification techniques to complex live-cell imaging of GFP in plants. Additionally, the journal frequently offers free, full-access trial subscriptions for scientists interested in thoroughly accessing the full breadth of peer-reviewed resources available.
BLAST (NCBI)
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is no stranger to most life science researchers, but the site's BLAST tool is significantly more than just a simple alignment tool. Need to quickly and accurately design primers? Check out Primer-BLAST. Having trouble accurately discerning your sequence of interest from your vector backbone? VecScreen can actively identify and remove any nucleic acid sequences of vector origin before detailed analyzing.
iBiology
If you need to rapidly brush up on a complex technique or foundational concept in biology you're unfamiliar with, iBiology is an incredible collaboration of leading biologists bringing free, open-access, high-quality videos to researchers worldwide. Teaching a university course? iBiology also has extensive resources for educators to seamlessly incorporate directly into their curriculum. With over 275 videos (and continually counting), you're practically guaranteed to find content highly relevant to your specific research niche.
EasyBib
Offered by Chegg, EasyBib provides students and academic researchers with a highly intuitive, free citation generator supporting several common scientific and academic citation styles. If you're interested in testing EasyBib's advanced capabilities, you can check out their Easybib Plus free trial, which includes integrated plagiarism checking, help with over 7,000+ obscure citation styles, and robust advanced grammatical error detection.
Benchling
The modern era of electronic lab notebooks is officially here, and Benchling offers a remarkably powerful, free resource tailored specifically for academic researchers. With a massive wealth of integrated molecular biology tools, robust inventory capabilities, and total access to the secure cloud-based software from absolutely any internet connection, researchers can effectively save paper while easily maintaining rigorous version control of their protocols, sequences, and experimental data.
Science Source Images
Looking for high-quality, professional science images for your upcoming conferences, presentations, or lectures? Science Source offers an extensive library of both royalty-free and strictly rights-managed images and videos exclusively for your use. The diverse types of visual content available include detailed 3D microscopic images, fluid 3D molecular animations, historical scientific etchings/drawings, complex medical illustrations, and much more.
BioRender
The frustrating days of manually illustrating complex cells, signaling pathways, and proteins in PowerPoint are finally behind us thanks to the ever-growing BioRender icon library. With an intuitive interface featuring over 20,000 specific biological icons, you can simply drag and drop elements to rapidly create stunning, publication-ready scientific figures in a matter of minutes. BioRender intelligently offers different subscription levels with varying academic and commercial licensing options, so be sure to check out their pricing structure here to find the most suitable package for your laboratory.