Kieran Haley, a Sociologist at Duke has an interesting paper that provides advice on research tools for beginning graduate students—or perhaps for brand new faculty members—in the social sciences. Haley has a Uses This profile that gives a précis of his background.
It’s Irreal fodder because his primary recommendation is Emacs and R. The paper is from 2013 so it’s a bit dated—he’s using Emacs 23—but its advice is still very relevant today. Actually, Emacs provides an even better solution today than it did in 2013. This is mostly because of the growing ecosystem around Org mode. For example, John Kitchin’s org-ref addresses many of the citation problems that Haley mentions.
One of the things that that Haley calls out as very important is reproducible research and keeping your data, processing code, and text together. Org mode excels in this and provides a way of ensuring that your computed results always match your data.
If you’re just starting graduate school or an academic career in the sciences—even the social sciences—you should definitely take a look at Haley’s paper. It’s got a lot of useful suggestions and makes a few specific suggestions about tools. Emacs and Org are a steep hill to climb, of course, but very much worth the effort.