Research Buddy

Research Buddy is a web browser plugin that aims to make the dreary task of research less tedious. As students, we are all too familiar with the endless reading and note-taking required in producing a research paper. Fortunately, Research Buddy is there to help. The plugin notes all the interesting papers we read, remembers important paragraphs, and puts citations into a variety of appropriate formats. It even lets us group citations into different topics and manage those topics.

The best part of having Research Buddy is the ease we now have in referencing quotes in our papers. Whenever we find a quote on a webpage that we need to reference, we simply select the text and click "Research Buddy" in the right-click menu (though selecting the text is optional). This opens the main Research Buddy dialog, where we can choose which research topic the page should be filed under. Just a click on "Add to selected topic" and the reference is saved to the topic. Depending on our preferences, we can also save the page and its images to our disk.

Requirements for using Research Buddy are minimal. All you need is a Firefox browser version of 0.7 to 1.10, and you can start using this plugin starting December 8, 2004. With Research Buddy, research has never been easier, more manageable, and more fun. We can now focus more on actually writing our research paper, knowing that referencing is no longer a painstaking task to dread. Plus, we can keep our dreams of one day winning the Nobel Prize (or Turing Award) alive!