Supplementary Resources

This page contains useful supplementary resources and tools useful for research and training. Note that this list is not intended to be complete but rather a best practise that we found useful. However, for tools we provide references to alternatives as every person has its own style. Suggestions are welcome, too.

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen LaTeX templates for reports, presentations and theses available under CC-BY-SA 4.0 can be found here:
Version 1.2.1 (2024-02-20) - Report Template
Version 2.0 (2023-06-16) - Presentation Template
Version 1.5.1 (2024-02-20) - Thesis Template

The templates are provided as ZIP files. Uni Göttingen students can use ShareLaTeX. On the ShareLaTeX website, create a new project and select “Upload Project”, then submit the ZIP file.

Older templates for presentations, reports, theses, and letters can be found on our repository. They also contain some supplementary information on how to use and structure accordingly.

The following contains principles and concepts we found useful, tools are described separately.

• The student charter from Reading

• Effective communication

• Stress symptoms
• Stress at the workplace
• Stress management
• Wellbeing help at the University of Reading
• How to tackle mental health in the workplace as a manager and colleague: provides also further links for mental health
• Understanding Sleep Hygiene and Mental Health
• How to Manage Stress for Better Sleep
• How to Sleep Better
• Resilienz to stress
• Adjusting to working from home

• 28+ Top Interpersonal Skills in 2022

• Cycling to the university
• Sustainability

• Paper review criteria from Nature

• Video Guides on Literature Search, Management and Thesis Writing
• Gute wissenschaftliche Praxis
• How to write a paper in 10 steps
• See the support guides form the University of Reading Study Advice
• Record your experiments and summarize early all your effort as writing helps to learn further reading.
• Be open and allow reproducible research. See 12 Things you can do to be open.
• Use version control (Git, see below) to record your development and push the repository to have a backup
• Academic Ethics
• Tenses
• Math / Symbols in text
• (Relatively strict) instructions for writing an introduction
• Example instructions for preparing a paper (for science.org)

• Authorship
• Acknowledgement, Authorship longer
• Using previously published work in theses and dissertations (Rutgers School of Graduate Studies)
• Structure
• Author ordering; prefer contribution order

• Citations
• Which pronouns to use in the thesis (I prefer passive generally, with careful use of I/We): further reading

• Check Open Access Books

• Jonathan Decker - Scientific Presentation
• Tips
• There exist various styles; depending on the aim of the presentation few are effective
• Prof. Winston Lecture "How to Speak"

• Gaining self confidence
• The 7 principles of public life
• Motivation: How to achieve any goal

• See Julian's own primer to lightweight project management, which contains an honest reflection of his experience and the way he handles projects (created using Pandoc).

The success of any non-trivial endeavours depend on proper time and project management.

• See also Julian's primer to project management which contains an honest reflection of his experience.
• An average PhD week

• Agile development
• Test-driven development
• Git-Flow for collaboration
• Coding problems for gaining practice

• Introduction to HPC

The following is a list of tools we use. We welcome suggestions to improve this list.

Recording your progress and experiments is key to success and reproducibility.

• Google Doc for the joint recording of meetings and progress
• Jupyter notebook allows embedding description, experiment (data analysis), result and conclusion into one notebook.

• LaTeX (see also the template)
• Shared editing of documents with Overleaf

• Tips and examples for images and tables in LaTeX
• Tables; Less is More
• Best Practices for Papers in LaTeX
• Capitalization Styles for Titles
• LaTeX tables from CSV and Google Sheets

• LaTeX Beamer (see also the UoR template)
• To present a PDF: pdfpc

• Inkscape (vectors in SVG or PDF)
• Gimp (pixel/bitmap data, e.g., png)
• Graphviz (for quickly drawing trees)
• PlantUML (Graphviz extension) drawing software design documents

• R with the ggplot2 package Gallery with examples
• Python with Matplotlib Gallery with examples
• Plots in LaTeX with TikZ Gallery with examples; use TikZ with care, though as it is annoying to just produce a single graphics for later modification with e.g. Inkscape.

• Diataxis Framework

• Atom text editor for code editing
• Doxygen for documentation embedded in the code
• Sphinx for documentation in Python code
• PlantUML for embedding UML software design documents in the source code (powered by Doxygen).
• Docker for test-driven development / testing on different environments
• Travis for continous integration (ensuring build process works)
• CMake for building complex projects in C/C++
• ctest (part of CMake) to run test harnesses
• Ant or Maven for Java (see the discussion here).
• Python training Learning coding / fun game for beginners
• Interactive Introduction

• Mindmaps with Freeplane
• Version control with Git, e.g., using GitHub