As a grad student and researcher, I’m always looking for tools that will make my academic work easier. In the past year, I’ve come to rely heavily on five tools that have become my research companions. Here they are:

Note: I’m a 100% Mac guy so nearly all of these programs are only available for the Mac. There may be PC-based alternatives that I’ve missed. If there are, feel free to add them to the comments.

1. Papers | Mekentosj: I’ve built my own knowledge management system around Papers and recommend it as a must-have program for anyone doing academic research. Built-in search functions allow you to find the latest research and easily import article PDFs into your library. Once in your library, you can annotate, keyword tag, and create smart folders for all of your articles. Plus, the folks at Mekentosj have built a companion iPhone/iPod Touch app that integrates and synchronizes your Papers library on your handheld. It’s super sweet!

2. PDFpenPro | Smile on My Mac: There are plenty of PDF editors on the market (even Apple’s Preview program has editing capabilities). What sets PDFpenPro apart for me is its built-in OCR, wide array of editing tools, and small footprint that takes up little space and sucks up little memory (its that latter item that beats the crap out of Adobe’s Acrobat program). Plus, it integrates into Papers so any notations or edits I make in a PDF are automatically sync’ed into my Papers library.

3. Bookends | Sonny Software: At first glance, Bookends may not seem like much, but once you start to use it you understand just how heavenly it is. If you’re like me, you know keeping track of bibliographies and citations in your research is a major pain in the rear. Bookends makes it simple. You can export your article citations out of Papers into Bookends and the program takes care of getting them into the right style for you. And it’s even better when you use Bookends along with…

4. Mellel II | Redlers: Yes, MS Word is a decent word processing program, but is it made for writing research? Not really. Mellel is and it does the job admirably. It integrates amazingly well with Bookends so your citations and bibliography are constantly kept up to date with your writing. It has everything you need and nothing you don’t when it comes to writing your next academic article. And it exports cleanly to .doc so there’s really no reason to even open up Word.

5. Google Scholar: I’m adding Google Scholar to this list because it is one of the most comprehensive search engines for finding published research articles. It’s simple and it’s powerful. What more do you need?

Any other research tools that you’ve come to rely on in your academic work? I would love to hear about them.