I have often recommended academic.live.com by Microsoft as a worthy rival to Google Scholar. At the very least, it was superior in its interface and sorting capabilities. Unfortunately, it provided much less relevant results in the humanities (focusing on more recent publications).

Great news for anybody out there who's using the free bibliography too l Zotero! With what I'm assuming was a small upgrade to the catalogue software, Zotero can now see results on the page of the catalogue and import them into the bibliography with just one click (individually or as a group).

In its struggle to remain relevant, Britannica is planning to open its gates to the public for contributions, to a certain extent following Wikipedia's model. But even its announcement shows that commercial interests can prevail over truth. Although Wikipedia's influence is clear, it is not mentioned once!

Another reason why everyone should be using Firefox - you can improve your browsing experience so much with so many handy extensions. This one will pronounce words for you. This is particularly handy for academics who often run into words that are said outloud only infrequently (and this goes for both native and non-native speakers).

So many documents an academic comes into contact with are published in PDF and require Adobe Acrobat Reader to open them. But the Acrobat Reader is incredibly slow to load. Version 8 improved things a bit on fast computers but it is still annoying. Enter the free, agile FoxIt reader which just came out with version 2.3 that introduced tabbed browsing (among other innovations).

One of the significant complaints about Wikipedia is that there is no reliable way to assess the quality of an individual entry. A new research shows that the length of the article is a very good indicator of quality. Entries longer than 1,830 (or about 2,000) words, i.e. the length of a decent essay, are usually fairly good quality.

EndNote's main competitor Zotero's main advantage (apart from being free and improving fast) is being able to 'scrape' citations from websites saving us the effort of retyping them. But it can only do that from websites that use a certain standards (such as this site) or that were specifically encoded for Zotero. These now include CiteULike and LibraryThing which have a lot