15 Research Tools and Resources For Presentations
November 23, 2015
Creating great presentations is hard work. It takes creative content, an enticing title, beautiful slides, and effective promotion. Perhaps most importantly, the success of your efforts will also be determined by the value of the information provided on your slides.
It can be difficult to find fresh, credible stats and facts to support the overall message of your presentation without sifting through pages and pages of research reports and whitepapers. Instead, use your time more effectively with the tools and resources included below.
Summary: Phlo is your one-stop search box that searches across all popular search engines and sites at once. Search using Phlo on your Mac, iPhone and iPad. Access all your search history and saved sites across devices using the Phlo Sync service. Using the free Phlo Assistant browser extension, you can add your favorite sites to your Phlo account with one click.
Summary: Papers helps you collect and curate the research material that you’re passionate about. From citations to search, Papers will improve the way you find, organize, read, cite and share.
Summary: Narrow down search results for complex searches by using the Advanced Search page. For example, you can find sites updated in the last 24 hours or images that are in black and white. If you can’t find it with a basic Google search, try the Advanced search options.
Summary: Search operators are words that can be added to searches to help narrow down the results. Put these operators in your back pocket to extend your searching capabilities.
Summary: Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Summary: BuzzSumo provides insights into the most popular content online and the influencers sharing it.
Summary: With the world’s best sources organized into thousands of topics, it’s a single place to follow the stories and people that matter to you.
Summary: A single place to read your favorite newspapers, magazines and blogs.
Summary: Here you will find a collection of resources providing free access to business and economic statistics collected by the U.S. Government.
Summary: The US census provides quick, easy access to facts about people, business, and geography.
Summary: Kaiser Family Foundation Global Health Facts is a non-partisan source of facts, analysis and journalism for policymakers, the media, the health policy community and the public.
Summary: WHO’s research portal provides access to data and analyses for monitoring the global health situation.
Summary: As home of the U.S. Government’s open data, here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
Summary: Scribd is a membership book subscription service as well as a popular open platform for publishing and sharing documents of all kinds. To date, people all over the world have shared more than 60 million documents via Scribd, from landmark court filings to business presentations to academic papers from scholars around the world.
Summary: Nielsen's industry-leading consumer lifestyle segmentation yields the richest consumer behavioral information for shopping, financial and technology preferences, media habits (online and offline) and so much more.
Conclusion: As you collect research for your presentations, stay organized by using tools like Evernote, Pinboard, Diigo, or Saved.io. Let us know what other research resources and content organizational tools we should add to this list by tweeting us at @Ethos3. We’d love to hear from you.
About the Author
Leslie Belknap is the Senior Content Strategist for Ethos3, as well as a board member and speakers’ coach for TEDxNashville. Say hi to Leslie onTwitter; she manages tweets for Ethos3.