As is well-known, Die Zeit (The Time – Newspaper) accompanies the decent student throughout his studies from the enrolment, through their suburban homes, during the purchase of the first till the third car, during child optimisation and sometimes even while gardening – the whole time. A small article is now dedicated to software in the studies. We would like to comment briefly on it.
Actually, it will be brief since there is not much content in the article of Die Zeit. The programs Paper Toss, Foldit, Challenging Alarm Clock and Stay Focused rather distract from studying in our opinion. Everybody should have a program like Evernote or Zotero on the computer if you are spending a lot of time in front of the PC. TinEye and PlagiatCheck can be definitely considered as small tools. But are they really software for the studies?!
With Docear the author should have dedicated more than the given 2 minutes of research: “…is what we call an “academic literature suite”. It integrates everything you need to search, organize and create academic literature in a single application: a digital library, reference manager, PDF and file manager, note taking and mind mapping.” (www.docear.org) Docear is Open Source, free and a ‘young’ and promising program. A short overview can be found here: Docear at SoSciSo.
It can be credited to Die Zeit that before publishing the article, SoSciSo unfortunately was not only yet and research was somehow complicated ;).