This page collects references, links, data repositories, and books that I have found helpful or motivating. In all cases, the lists are highly biased by my own experience.

Giving talks

• Jelena Grujic gave a good talk on How to give a good talk at the yrCSS Warm-Up 2020.
• An all-time favorite: How to speak by Patrick Winston.
• When designing your presentations, it’s always helpful to consider some basics in data visualization. Data vis artists Lisa Charlotte Muth and Jane Adams provide valuable insights.
• More tips on giving scientific talks and data vis by researcher Dan Larremore.

Writing

• The book How to Write a Scientific Paper: An Academic Self-help Guide for PhD Students by the researcher Jari Saramäki is a gem. He was kind to give us a talk about it and share its slides during the yrCSS Warm-Up 2022.
• Manson A. Porter’s website offers a collection of writing resources, including examples of cover letters.
• The book The elements of style is not focused on academic writing, but it can be useful for non-native English speakers like myself.
• Despite the flamboyant title, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded contains solid advice and knowledge about academic writing with very pertinent examples.
• Daphne Gray-Grant, a publication coach, runs a writing blog with interesting tips on academic writing, from dealing with writer’s block to mindmapping. Her newsletter helped me during my dissertation writing.
• I also shared my PhD thesis template and some personalization/formating tips.

Mental health

• On the first day of PhD, my supervisor Sandro Meloni sent me this list of Twenty things I wish I’d known when I started my PhD.
• How to draw a cat. Really!
• I had the opportunity to discuss Dealing with the 3Ps: Procrastination, Productivity and PhD at a NetPLACE seminar.
• A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science is a book that sparked an interesting internal debate for me, even though it’s a bit outdated after 20 years. While I don’t endorse every single line, it’s helpful to know different perspectives.
• Walk in nature and have a hobby . I practice calisthenics and fold origami, what about you?

Organizations for early-career researchers

• The young researchers of the Complex Systems Society (yrCSS) is an elected group of early-career researchers who promote and organize initiatives like annual Bridge Grants, Scholarships for Events on Complex Systems, and the Warm-Up School on Complex Systems with the support of the Complex Systems Society.
• NetPLACE (Networks, Phd Life And ComplExity Seminars, or simply NetPLACE Seminars) is a group of early-career researchers that provides a friendly and welcoming place for graduate and postgraduate students worldwide to interact and present new/interesting developments, as well as difficulties during their PhD studies in the complex systems and networks field. Check their Youtube channel for past talks!
• The “Young Modellers in Ecology” (YoMos) is a group of young scientists working in all fields of ecological modelling. They organize annual workshops and conference meetings.
• The Society of Women in Network Science (WiNS) connects women, trans and non-binary network scientists from different races, socioeconomic backgrounds, and nations. The society aims to recognize the work, perspectives, and expertise of its members to create bridges between academia, government, and private industry related to network science.

Datasets for ecology and computational social sciences

• Web of life: a collection of food-webs, mutualistic and host-parasite networks maintained by the Bascompte Lab.
• Living Planet Index: stores population trends.
• BioTIME: global database of assemblage time series for quantifying and understanding biodiversity change.
• Twitter datasets publicly available: 30 different datasets associated with real-world events and two datasets of Spanish elections.
• Allen Coral Atlas: monitors the world’s coral reefs.
• Tidy Tuesday: An “R For Data Science” initiative where weekly data analysis problems allow practice for programming and data visualization skills with a remarkable collection of data sets.

I hope you find these resources as valuable and beneficial as I have. Let me know if you have any suggestions. Happy researching!