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I am currently working towards a Statistics BSc and am frequently having to organise my research. I am currently using a mixture of a mediawiki, and a bibliography browser plugin, to make an archive of my online data sources, and references to pdfs with useful information. but its becoming a bit of a mess.

Is there any research tool that is orientated towards statistics?

would-likes include

  1. //TODO, task tracking so I can have a central list of outstanding tasks
  2. some cloud storage, so I can access my archive from any machine

some suggestions have been

  • org-mode
  • zotero
  • mediawiki

(I guess that anything I could store the files as text, I can distribute my work using SVN/git etc)

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Org-mode is incredibly powerful and flexible. – David May 6 '11 at 4:19
I think you should have a separate tool for bibliography, as it is a very different task from note taking, TODO etc. My choice would go on Zotero, as it's FLOSS, very powerful, has a much easier workflow than some commercial tools (such as EndNote) and is compatible with both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word. – nico May 6 '11 at 6:18
You also might find this question interesting. – steffen May 6 '11 at 7:33
what OS are you running? – Tal Galili May 6 '11 at 11:26

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

Steffen's comment and link to the question above is very useful.

I would say that it depends. I am going to assume that you are using LaTeX, at least (for mathematical typesetting), and possibly R (cos its free, and great).

In that case, especially given that you have mentioned org-mode, I would suggest using Emacs to organise your statistical analysis.

The advantages are as follows: unify your statistical analysis (Emacs Speaks Statistics), your paper writing (LaTeX) - Emacs sweave support is also the best I have found. You also have Ebib to manage references, and this is very nice. Emacs is so customizable that anything you need to do, can be done from within it. However, it has quite a steep learning curve, and you may need to unlearn some shortcuts and ways of dealing with programs that are commonplace elsewhere.

Emacs also has integrated version control. I cannot speak to their quality as I have not used it.

On reference management, I personally didn't like Zotero, and use JabRef. JabRef is nice for the GUI and its simplicity, and could support you while you learn enough about Emacs to be productive within it. It also has a cite while you write plugin for open office, if you like that kind of thing.

HTH.

share|improve this answer
Generally, in terms of an R/Sweave workflow, RStudio is perfectly functional now and rapidly maturing. No bib support but I've always preferred using a citation manager that syncs to a .bib anyway. It is IMO a better choice for these tasks if you don't already know (or want to really learn) Emacs. Of course really knowing Emacs pays other dividends... – JMS May 7 '11 at 5:12
i totally agree about RStudio, but given that i am learning bits of pieces of many different languages along with all the stats and referencing, emacs suits me perfectly. – richiemorrisroe May 7 '11 at 7:24
Most certainly - those are the sort of dividends I was referring to :) – JMS May 7 '11 at 20:45

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