Freewares

Description

Here’s a list of freewares I constantly use on my Apple computer:

• Overleaf: Overleaf is an online collaborative authoring tool written in the LaTex markup language. It is relatively easy to use, allows for commenting by multiple authors, contains a good number of template for CVs, journal articles, books, etc., and allows the creation of folders to help organize your projects. I have been using the free version of Overleaf for 3 years before switching to the professional version, which comes free from my university. The professional version allows for tracked changes. You can register for Overleaf here.

• RStudio: I am still, really, a huge Stata fan. But every now and then, I find that my code runs faster, my figures look nicer, and my data documentation looks more professional when I use R (especially when I use an R Notebook). I also find it much easier to share an R project rather Stata do-files, regardless of how organized the do-files are. Stata is expensive while R is free. RStudio can be downloaded here. To be able to use RStudio, you will need to install R first.

• Sublime Text: Sublime Text is a text editor for code that I mostly use to create my TEX documents offline. An easy-to-follow guide on how to install LatexTools using Sublime Text on a Macbook can be found here. You will need to download Sublime Text, MacTex, and Skim. The 2024 version of MacTex is 5.7 GB, so it will take a while to download it.

• Zotero: I have used several citation managers in the passed (i.e., JabRef, EndNote, Mendeley, etc.), but for the last 3 years, I have solely been using Zotero as my citation manager. Among many positive things, the learning curve for Zotero is reasonable, you can share references and actual PDFs with collaborators, and you can annotate articles. To download Zotero, click here. You will need to register for a free account.