The following tools are often useful when you work with your project and Master's theses:
MATLAB and friends
During the RAMS study it is very important to be familiar with a mathematical program, such as MATLAB or one of its clones:
Note-taking
When you write a scientific report, you will usually start by reading a lot of literature, taking notes, and organizing these notes into a structure of chapters and sections. This can obviously be done in a word processor (e.g., LaTeX, LibreOffice, AbiWord, or Microsoft Word), but it is often more efficient to use a specific tool for this purpose. An excellent and free example of such a tool is Evernote. This tool has a lot of nice features and is available for many types of computers and mobile phones.
There are many alternatives to Evernote, but this program meets my requirements.
Searching for literature
When you write your project- or Master's thesis, you have to search for various types of literature. Some relevant sources are listed below. The list is not exhaustive, so you may also need to consult other sources:
- NTNU University Library. From this page you have access to a wide range of books, databases, journals, and so on.
- ScienceDirect. This is a database of scientific articles published by Elsevier. When you are using a computer at NTNU (with an NTNU IP number), you will get full access to all articles (also in pdf format)
- Engineering Village. This database covers articles from many different publishers (see above)
- Google Scholar. This is similar to standard Google, but limited to scholarly items.
- Google Books. This site contains a very high number of books which you can read on the screen. All books are not complete and several pages may be missing.
- Knovel. This is a database containing a wide range of textbooks. As long as you access Knovel from an NTNU computer, you have full access.
- OnePetro. Literature related to the oil and gas industry.
References
Zotero is a plugin to the Firefox browser that can be used to record and manage references. Zotero is also available as a stand-alone tool for most other browsers. When you search for literature in, for example, Amazon,ScienceDirect or Google Scholar, and find something of interest, you just click the Zotero icon in Firefox - and then the reference is properly recorded. You may afterwards edit and make add notes to the references, and group them into sub-libraries. If you are using LaTeX for writing reports etc., you can easily export the Zotero references in bib-format to be used with BibTeX - a very efficient tool!
Standards
To get a copy of a standard, you have to do the following:
- Go to the NTNU library website: http://www.ntnu.edu/ub
- In the left-hand menu, select Database
- You have now come to the site "Find database" - select Category
- Under the heading "Category", scroll down till you find the item Standards (next lowest) and select this and press GO.
- You have now come to a page called "Database List" where several different categories of standards are listed.
- If you look for IEC or ISO standards, select "NS, NEK og NORSOK standarder i fulltekst"
- You next come to a page in Norwegian called "Standarder (NS, ISO, NEK og NORSOK". To come further, you have to install a small "plug-in" on your computer (There is one for Windows and another for Mac) - Do this. (This only applies for the first time you access the standards).
- Now you can access the standards by selecting the link in the lowest line of the web page, i.e., "Når installasjonen er gjort får du tilgang til standardene her"
- You may now search for the standards you need!. NB: It is not possible to download and store the standards in pdf-format. You can only read them on the scree or print them.
Standards - How you can get standards through the NTNU Library
Writing guide - Some simple rules when writing your project or Master's report