A-Z Resource List & FAQs
Info Usage » Research Tools

Learn the basic features of Excel with screenshots, videos, and text explanations. More useful features available in the Excel Tips & Excel Formulas section.

Search for books in the public domain or snippets of copyrighted books.

Find and compare word use frequency of all the books in Google Books.

Find and compare word use frequency of all the books in Google Books.

Use Google Earth to explore geographical regions and present information geographically. Example: Myths and Legends from Around the World.

Use Google Earth to explore geographical regions and present information geographically. Example: Myths and Legends from Around the World.

Using public datasets and metrics from the US Census, World Bank, IMF, WTO and various international organizations, Google Public Data Explorer makes it easy to visualize comparisons of statistics between various countries.

Use the power of Google to search for books, articles, and online resources. Access via UWest to incorporate our full text database resources.

👩‍🏫 Short 5 min. tutorial on accessing library resources with Google Scholar: PDF, Video. If you encounter an error such as "ERROR for site owner: Invalid domain for site key" or any of the other functions/features of Google Scholar, then use the personalized Google Scholar setup instead.

Non-Uwest patrons: Alternative access.

An extension for Firefox or Chrome that can help you find full-text articles on Google scholar, along with other features such as cited by and related articles. Includes a citing feature--watch out for errors such as capitalization and punctuation.

An extension for Firefox or Chrome that can help you find full-text articles on Google scholar, along with other features such as cited by and related articles. Includes a citing feature--watch out for errors such as capitalization and punctuation.

Find case laws from federal and state courts.

Juxtapose helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.).

An extension for Firefox or Chrome that can help you find full-text articles, along with other features such as citation metrics and related articles. Includes a citing feature--watch out for errors such as capitalization and punctuation.

An extension for Firefox or Chrome that can help you find full-text articles, along with other features such as citation metrics and related articles. Includes a citing feature--watch out for errors such as capitalization and punctuation.

"With MARKUS you can upload a file in classical Chinese (and perhaps in the future other languages) and tag personal names, place names, temporal references, and bureaucratic offices automatically. You can also upload your own list of key terms for automated tagging. You can then read a document while checking a range of reference works at the same time, or compare passages in which the same names or keywords appear." Check its research blog examples of how the data extracted from this tool is used.

Keep up to date on new features with the official Google scholar blog.

Indexes over 400,000 maps.

This app and Chrome/Firefox extension helps you find freely accessible (open access) version of journal articles and makes it easy for you to check the library's databases and request articles. 🛠️ To make sure it works with our library databases, after installation, make sure to go to Settings and add the following to the 'Institutional Settings' options: (1) Search by name: University of the West (2) Enable EZProxy Support: https://uwest.idm.oclc.org/login?url= (3) Enable Ask Your Library: https://uwest.on.worldcat.org/atoztitles/link?doi

An open source mapping application.

SceneVR is an engaging way to tell stories from an entirely new perspective. It turns your collection of panoramic and VR-ready photos into a slideshow of navigable scenes, allowing you to create unique 360° narratives.

Allows for the incorporation of maps and other visual aids into an online presentation.

Storyline is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build an annotated, interactive line chart.

Create your own word cloud to visualize word frequence.

Enter text from any document or paper and the Text Analyzer finds related full text articles from JSTOR.

Non-UWest users may go to: http://www.jstor.org/analyze/

TimelineCurator is able to automatically extract temporal references (dates) from free form text and place time into a visual timeline.

Use your web browser to create a quick timeline. This application can either accept manual timeline entries or automatically extract temporal (dates) from any segment of text.

Use Google sheets to create a timeline and add multimedia to the timeline.

This extension for Firefox and Chrome gets the freely available open access full-text of articles as you browse.

A free software tool that enables the visualization of bibliographic data.

Voyant Tools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts. Generate world clouds, world frequency lists, word usage visualizations, etc.