Researcher Base and the Teaching Deck Library: You Don’t Have to Figure Out Research Alone

This article was originally published in Vista Newsletter (opens in a new tab) No.144.

Hi everyone, and a happy Mid-Autumn Festival to you all!

In this issue, I want to introduce two websites that have taken up most of my time and energy lately: Researcher Base (opens in a new tab) (researcher.tw), and its sister site, the Teaching Deck Library (opens in a new tab) (deck.researcher.tw).

Before getting into the features, I’d like to start with something from a long time ago, because it is the very reason these two sites exist.

Back in grad school, most of what I knew I had to figure out myself

When I was in graduate school, what struck me most wasn’t how hard the coursework was. It was the information gap.

Which databases did the school subscribe to? Where could you request a journal article you couldn’t find? How should you organize your reading so you didn’t forget it all? What should you watch out for before submitting a paper? What do committee members usually ask at the oral defense? Nobody formally teaches you any of this. It isn’t covered in class, and it isn’t in the department handbook.

Back then, there were only two ways to learn. One was trial and error: you hit a wall, and only then discovered there was a better way. The other was secondhand word of mouth, fragments picked up from senior students or classmates. Sometimes it was useful, sometimes it was already outdated, and most of the time you didn’t even know who to ask.

This situation is actually quite common, and it even comes down to luck. Among graduate students, some happen to land in the right lab and meet seniors willing to pass things on, and they avoid a lot of detours. Others aren’t so lucky and have to feel their way through the dark alone. The difference usually isn’t ability. It’s information.

Later, when I began teaching at universities and research institutions and met more and more graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, I realized this problem had never gone away. Research tools have turned over several times, and AI has arrived, yet most people still have to work out for themselves where to start, what to use, and what to avoid.

The resources for the research journey have always been out there. They’re just scattered everywhere. So I decided to take the time to pull them together.

It started with a Facebook group

Researcher Base grew out of Thesis Dojo (opens in a new tab) (博碩士生練功團), a Facebook group I’ve run for many years. It now has more than 15,000 members who have long been sharing what they’ve learned about thesis writing and research methods.

The group is lively, but it has a structural limitation: good answers get pushed down by new posts, and the same questions come up again every few months. “How do I actually write a literature review?” “Do I need to disclose using AI for editing?” “What kind of journal should I choose for my first submission?” Questions like these deserve a home where the answers can be kept and updated over time.

On August 8 this year, researcher.tw (opens in a new tab) went live. At first it leaned toward introducing tools, but the more I built, the more I felt the protagonist of research should be people, not tools. So on September 6, the site was renamed Researcher Base (研究者基地), and I wrote the line that now sits on the homepage:

A researcher is not a lone star. Here, you can see the whole night sky.

What you’ll find at Researcher Base

In short, the whole site (opens in a new tab) is organized around the order in which research actually moves forward. You don’t need to know which category a tool belongs to. Just start from the step where you’re stuck right now. There are currently seven main sections:

1. Six free online courses

58 units in total, no account required, no payment, and you set your own pace. The six courses (opens in a new tab) take you from the ethical boundaries of using AI in academia, through reading literature, writing, designing research questions, and debugging your analysis, all the way to submission strategy. Together they form a complete research workflow, and they work best taken in order.

My position here is clear: I don’t teach using AI to write for you, only using AI to assist you. The core thinking and judgment must be your own; AI helps you finish the rigorous checks you’d otherwise never have time for.

2. The academic research resource library

It covers 77 academic research tools (opens in a new tab), grouped into eight stages of the research process: finding literature, reading and note-taking, managing literature and citations, data analysis and methods, visualization and open data, writing and editing, submission and oral defense, and general-purpose AI assistants. Each entry explains what situations it suits, how it’s priced, and which articles on the site relate to it. You can search, or filter by stage.

3. Six free research tools

I built these six tools (opens in a new tab) myself, and each one solves one specific problem:

• Research Question Scaffold: turn a vague idea into a research question you can actually write about
• Literature Review Matrix: lay out dozens of papers in one comparable table
• Output Notebook: finish a book with notes you can actually use
• AI Collaboration Boundary Card: review eight stages of research and see where you’re handing too much to AI
• Better Question Builder: rework a vague prompt into a question that forces a real answer
• AI Use Disclosure and Ethics Check: produce a bilingual (Chinese and English) AI disclosure statement for your submission in three minutes

One thing worth emphasizing: I know many graduate students and faculty would rather others not know they’re exploring how to use AI in their academic work. So all six tools run entirely in your browser. No sign-up, no login, and whatever you enter stays on your own device. Nothing is sent to any server.

4. Book recommendations for researchers

Tools help you work faster; good books (opens in a new tab) help you build judgment. There are currently 61 books, organized by seven abilities researchers actually need, such as graduate admissions and studying abroad, research methods, and thesis writing. Each entry explains when you should read it. Whatever ability you’re missing, pick up the book for it. If you have other books to recommend, feel free to let me know in the comments.

5. Articles

There are currently 48 articles (opens in a new tab), all about things your thesis will never mention but every researcher runs into. A recent one, A Guide to Campus Resources for Graduate Students (opens in a new tab), breaks down seven kinds of campus resources, including your advisor, department staff, the library, and research support offices, and explains how and when to approach each. That article was really written for my younger, helpless self.

6. Research guides

These rearrange the site’s articles by topic into an eight-stop route (opens in a new tab): getting started on a thesis, finding literature, reading and reviewing literature, thesis writing, submission and peer review, conference presentations, collaborating with AI, and academic ethics and AI disclosure. Each stop starts with a short answer you can use right away, then links to the full articles and tools. If you want to master one topic in one sitting, this is the fastest way in.

7. Services

If you coordinate programs for a department, research center, or library and would like to invite me to teach or speak, the services page (opens in a new tab) lists my teaching topics, open-enrollment in-person workshops, and past collaborations.

The Teaching Deck Library: opening up what I teach in class

A month after Researcher Base launched, on September 11, I opened the Teaching Deck Library (opens in a new tab).

The idea behind it is simple. Rather than filing away the slide decks I’ve presented at universities and research institutions once the talk is over, I’d rather tidy them up and put them online so more people can see them. For graduate students, it’s a set of complete teaching materials you can browse on your own. For schools and institutions thinking about inviting me, it’s a chance to see what the actual teaching looks like before reaching out.

The library currently holds 16 decks, 12 of which are fully public and need no password. Most are complete teaching materials of around 100 slides, for example (the decks are in Traditional Chinese):

• The Graduate Student Survival Guide: Finish Your Research, and Find Yourself Again (opens in a new tab)
• Can’t Understand Your Professor or Find a Direction? Decoding Your First Month of Graduate School (opens in a new tab)
• What Is a Literature Review Really For? For Those Just Starting a Thesis (opens in a new tab)
• What Should an Abstract Actually Say? For Those Just Starting a Thesis (opens in a new tab)
• For First-Time Submitters: A Practical Guide from Conference to Journal (opens in a new tab)
• Understanding Writing Resistance: A Recovery Handbook for Thesis Procrastinators (opens in a new tab)
• The P in PhD Is Not for Prompt: Defending Graduate Students’ Judgment (opens in a new tab)

Another 4 decks were prepared for specific courses and require a password; they’re mainly for participants who attended in person.

Several decks are adapted from articles on Researcher Base. On the same topic, the article is for slow reading, while the deck lets you grasp the structure quickly, and works well for discussing with your labmates.

Where to start

There’s a lot on these sites, and on your first visit you may not know where to begin. I suggest picking your entry point based on where you are right now:

• Just started grad school and haven’t settled on a topic: first read Decoding Your First Month of Graduate School (opens in a new tab), then begin the research guides at the “getting started on a thesis” stop.
• You have a topic, but there’s too much to read: open the “finding literature” and “reading and note-taking” stages in the resource library, then use the Literature Review Matrix to lay out the papers you’ve read in one table.
• You’re writing but keep getting stuck: read Understanding Writing Resistance to figure out which kind of stuck you are, then take Course 3 on writing.
• Getting ready to submit: generate a statement with the AI Use Disclosure tool, then go through the four checkpoints in the For First-Time Submitters (opens in a new tab) deck.
• You want to learn to use AI for research systematically: start the six free courses from Course 1 and take them in order.

Both the resource library and the deck library are searchable. On the Teaching Deck Library homepage, press the slash key to search directly, or click a topic tag at the top to filter.

Want someone to walk you through it? In-person workshop on October 31

If you’ve finished the free courses and want to apply these methods to your own thesis, I’m running a three-hour in-person workshop on the morning of Saturday, October 31: the AI-Empowered Academic Research and Writing Workshop (opens in a new tab) (taught in Mandarin).

The biggest difference from the free courses is that you bring your own topic and draft. Using an AI agent such as Claude Code, we’ll walk through a complete research workflow: setting boundaries and methods for working with AI, using the agent to search, screen, and summarize literature into a review matrix, and finally revising your draft together to make it clearer, all while staying within academic ethics and proper AI disclosure.

• Date and time: Saturday, October 31, 2026, 09:00 to 12:00
• Location: central Taipei, within walking distance of an MRT station (the exact classroom address is sent after registration)
• Capacity: limited to 20 people per session, first come, first served
• Fee: early-bird NT$4,500 when you register by September 30; NT$5,500 from October 1
• Before class: bring your own laptop; we recommend subscribing to Claude Pro for one month beforehand

The early-bird price ends at the end of this month, so if you’re interested, don’t wait too long.

See the workshop details and register (opens in a new tab)

Finally, an invitation to use them

Both sites are still growing. The resource library will keep adding tools, and new articles and decks will keep coming. My hope is simple: that the next person who walks into graduate school won’t have to feel their way through the dark alone, the way I once did.

If you’re writing a thesis, bookmark Researcher Base and come back whenever you’re stuck. If you have friends, students, or family in graduate school, please feel free to forward this to them. Sometimes a good link really can save someone months.

At the bottom of the Researcher Base homepage, you can also subscribe to site updates, and new courses, tools, and articles will land in your inbox as soon as they go live.

Researcher Base: https://researcher.tw/ (opens in a new tab)

Teaching Deck Library: https://deck.researcher.tw/ (opens in a new tab)

Once you’ve tried them, if something is hard to use, a tool is missing, or there’s a research question you’d like me to turn into an article or a deck, just reply and let me know. I read every message carefully.

You don’t have to walk the research path alone. Let’s keep going together!

Vista