Evernote

Evernote is a supporting app that help you in multiple ways. This helps you to organize works with reminders. Also it helps to take notes and record audios (lectures or meeting discussions). The camera supports in scanning documents as well. Get more info and tutorials here.

A reference manager

Having to enter each and every reference to your dissertation or manuscript will make your life miserable. This software will help you in managing all the references in a one place. Unfortunately Mendeley is the only software I could recommend. It has corrected some of the errors in early versions. The folders help you specially if you work in more than one fields. web importer helps in importing directly from the web site. Word plugins help in easy citing. Mendeley has integrated the referencing styles of all the major journals. So you just have to select the referencing style in the mendeley menu to format your manuscript’s reference list to suit the journal requirements.

Image J

This is a useful software for image analyzing. It helps in scaling, rotating and flipping of images. Also, you could use this to manage brightness, contrast and color balance of images. Most importantly you could use this to calculate the area and pixel value statistics of selected parts of the image. It can also be used to measure distances and angles within the image.

This tutoriaI I found on youtube shows how to use this software.

Inkscape

This is a valuable software for those who does scientific illustrations. I find this is absolutely helpful in preparing images for manuscripts. Unfortunately, I used Photoshop for a long time before I found this, which is much simpler than photoshop. Also, it is much better than the other apps like powerpoint. I have linked some tutorials here.

Grammarly

This is a really good app for non-native English users. Although you are a specialist in english, chances are you may overlook some grammatical errors in your document. Grammarly is helpful in such situations and helps you notice you mistakes. The word adds on helps you to do this offline as well. However, the paid version is much better than the free version, but if you are smart enough you could use free version to write your paper or thesis with minimum grammatical errors.

Dropbox

This is a software I recommend to all my junior Ph.D. students. Because everyone has the problem of misplacing documents and deleting the documents accidentally. Also, you may have to work on separate devices when at university and home. So, dropbox help you to keep you files safe in a cloud server. You can access the documents whenever you want using any pc/laptop or a mobile phone.

R studio

R studio is the main platform that let us use R statistical programming language in the offline mode. This is a really good alternative to expensive statistical analysis software such as SPSS, Minitab, Graphpad etc. This has all the functionality of the other software combined and lot of learning tools are available for free. My tips for you: don’t spend too much time learning this, start analyzing your data and always save the scripts. So next time it will be helpful to you. Also, practice with the R’s integrated data sets.

Epidata

This is another useful software. Its mainly designed to handle epidemiological data. But I am using it for all the types of data. This simply help us enter the data from questionnaire surveys or any other type of research. You could create customized data entry forms to enter your data. Later, you could import this data as a csv file. With a small knowledge on coding you may create much better data entry forms with conditional statements (defining limits and data types for each field), so that the false entries will be minimal.

Nitro Pro PDF reader

I have used several pdf readers. This is the best one I came across so far. Unfortunately, this is a paid one. You may check if your institute have subscribed for it. But if you pay for it the price really worth the functions. This allows you to edit the words within a pdf as well. Also, this supports splitting, converting to word and combining several pdf’s.

Forest

When you are busy, stressed and anxious there is a higher chance you end up doing nothing and spend your time on your phone making your life much more difficult. This is something I have heard from pretty much everyone who are doing their Ph.D.’s. This app may come handy for them. This pretty much works as a mobile game. You have to set up the time you want to work and press plant. If you work the entitled time without taking the phone, a tree will grow. I have not used this personally and got to know about this recently, but I highly recommend it because there are actual trees planted around the world depending on your progress in the virtual environment.

Twitter

This may come as a surprise, but if you use this with proper control, this could be the best app a researcher could have, especially if you are a fresh graduate looking for a Ph.D. position or a Ph.D. looking for research position. This helps you to follow the researchers in your field. They often tweet the opportunities on twitter. Also, having close contact with the top researchers in your field will always help you to update with new developments and trends in the field. Therefore, if used the right way, this is a great app for a researcher.