Currently I use Evernote as a lab notebook, constantly backed up and available everywhere (office, lab, home, library etc.) and zotero sync (beta of the new zotero 1.5) as a reference manager - again, ref database plus journal PDFs sync’d on multiple computer and available via the web on beta.zotero.org.

But I sometimes find myself torn about where to put info relating to, e.g., lab work and a paper I’ve read.

A mashup of Evernote and zotero, with a better system for managing and annotating PDFs, would pretty much solve all of my problems

Love the comment! Evernote is awesome, too, I couldn’t agree more. The idea of using it as a backup for papers is a great one, I’m definitely going to start using that. I’m headed off to try your Google Scholar tip right now, thanks for those!

And I love your idea of the perfect research tool, though I’d add one more thing to the list: searchability. I’d love to be able to download all my articles to my desktop, and then search through them for the name, keyword, or whatever that I’m looking for. A ton of different apps claim to do this, but I haven’t found any that really do.

If someone makes that app for you, let me know!

You’ll probably have to authenticate your relationship with the university, and I think in some places you can only do this from campus computers. But in my case, I can access it from anywhere, and I just have to login with my student information one time per session, and then I can just search away. I find it much easier to find articles this way than through library databases, though the library interface is useful for certain kinds of searches. Most times, though, I’m able to find tons of information on topics I choose (even fairly specific ones), and usually get at least some full-text articles. It’s very handy.

My other favorite student tool of the moment is Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/). I use it for a lot of things - for randomly jotting down thoughts, for taking notes during class, and as a form of backup when I’m writing papers (instead of/in addition to emailing it to myself). It also has web clips that serve a similar purpose to the one suggested here for Fireshot. You can take clips from the web, and then they’re just added to your Evernote notes. My favorite thing about Evernote is that it synchronizes across platforms, which makes it ideal for someone who works on multiple computers (including library computers that aren’t mine). If I write something in Evernote,I can write it on my computer then access it on the web, and vice versa, because it periodically synchronizes by itself.

My dream research tool (damn, I’m a nerd) would probably be some kind of mix between google scholar, evernote, and zotero, that enabled me to search for information, find articles, save whole articles (and access them from my desktop or online), automatically link them to my reference manager, clip out quotes - and automatically get proper citations for those if i need them, and write up a paper or article myself while being able to seamlessly insert references along the way. Anyone want to make that for me?