Resources

My journey into science was made possible by a host of grad students, post-docs, and professors committed to open science and the mentorship of young researchers.

Along the way, I’ve picked up a fair number of resources that I never would have found if they weren’t recommended to me. This list is a compilation of those resources.

If you have any additions you’d like to make, please reach out to me!

Citation Tools

  • freecitationchecker goes through your paper and locates your citations and automatically matches them with your references. Anything without a direct match or missing entirely gets flagged. Note that your file must be in .docx format. Created by John Andrew Chwe.

Coding

  • This Markdown Cheatsheet is a helpful guide to how to do many of the basics if you’re working with markdown files (e.g. Jupyter Notebook, R Markdown, Quarto Markdown).

Color Palette Generators

  • Coolors is a good site for generating color palettes on the fly. It’s fast, flexible, and honestly sometimes I just make palettes for fun.
  • ColorBrewer2 is an easy way to make more traditional R color palettes. Unlike Coolors, this has no ads, and a direct checkbox to filter for color-blind friendly palettes.

Data Analysis Tutorials

Behavioral

fMRI

  • Andy’s Brain Book is an all-round introduction to fMRI analysis using SPM, FSL, and AFNI.
  • DartBrains is designed to give an introduction to neuroimaging data analysis (with a focus on functional connectivity and multivoxel pattern analysis).

Data Annotation Tools

Audio

  • whisperX is an automatic speech recognition model designed to provide highly accurate transcriptions along with timestamps. This is an offshoot of OpenAI’s whisper with demonstrated superior performance. See arXiv paper here.

Visual

  • Easy OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is designed to extract natural language from images, producing text strings for more easy data processing. As of July 2025, compatible with printed text but not handwritten.
  • PARE (Part Attention REgressor) is an occlusion-robust human pose and shape estimator. See arXiv paper here.
  • Py-Feat is a Python toolbox designed to annotate facial expressions in terms of facial landmarks, action units, and emotional expression. See arXiv paper here.

Free Icons

  • Bootstrap can get you the basics - a bunch of filled and outlined vector graphics in case you need something simple.
  • Chojugiga has really cute options if you want up to four consistent characters in your presentation.
  • Flaticon has tons of options and makes it easy to get several versions of the same character for presentations.
    • I’m told that if you’re willing to make an account you can also change the color of some icons.
  • Font Awesome is similar to Bootstrap but has some more variety.
    • If you’re cheap like me and won’t pay for pro, there aren’t many more options but you might find something to your liking.
  • The Noun Project is similar to Bootstrap and Font Awesome but has a massive selection.

Open Source

Conference Workshops

Datasets

  • OpenCogData compiles publicly available cognitive task papers and datasets and is maintained by the NIMH Data Science & Sharing Team.
    • If you’re looking for some papers/datasets for a specific cognitive task/topic, this website also has a tagging system so you can filter relatively easily.
  • SNAP (the Stanford Network Analysis Project) has a collection of publicly available large network datasets.

Textbooks

Other Websites with Resource Lists

  • CompSAN or Computational Social Affective Neuroscience has a bunch of tutorials as well as a job board and links to other online resources.

Website Making Tutorials