Links :: PopLab @ Stanford

On Being a Scientist, a free book about responsible conduct in research
A Q&A about Reproducibility and Transparency in research
Principles of Semiconductor Devices, a free online textbook by B. Van Zeghbroeck
A Heat Transfer Textbook another free online book by J. Lienhard
General Chemistry by Petrucci et al. (from LibreTexts)
Full PDF books on the nanoHUB (S. Datta, M. Lundstrom)

Properties of silicon, GaN, and other semiconductors from the Ioffe Institute
Universal physical constants from NIST (and plain-text list)
Kaye & Laby Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants
Handbook of Carbon, Graphite, Diamond and Fullerenes (Pierson, 1993)
An interactive periodic table and another periodic table with very detailed elemental data

Eric's thoughts on good thesis talks, writing a research CV, faculty job apps, faculty job interviews, how tenure works, being a professor, writing rec letters, teaching evaluations, research in computer modeling, conference registration, figure & slide fonts, figure proportions, mobility and thermal conductivity units, how to prepare for a PhD program, how to choose a PhD program, grades in PhD programs, how to pick research problems, how to pick team members, students skipping class, seminar attendance, and other things
Prof. Serious (Substack) On Choosing an Academic Career
Rob Candler's paper on Stuff Most Students Never Ask about Grad School (IEEE)
"So Long, and Thanks for the PhD!", everything you wanted to know about grad school but were afraid to ask
Grad school, writing, and publishing advice from Jack Baker (Stanford CEE)
Stephen Secules on How to Be a Grad Student and Christos Kozyrakis on How to Be a Bad Grad Student
Related advice on "How to have a bad career in research/academia" by David Patterson
Advice for new grad students, women in engineering, and more from Jennifer Rexford
How to Succeed in Grad School Part 1 and Part 2 by Marie desJardins
How hard should science trainees work?

PLoS Ten Simple Rules Collection (short PDF) including Hamming on research (based on this long version)
Ten simple rules for getting published, making presentations, making posters, getting grants, etc.
How to choose a good scientific problem (U. Alon) and how to pick good problems (S. Senturia)
David Goodstein's Chapter 3 on How Science Works from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence
Prashant Kamat's website on research, publishing, and graphics
Nicholas Carlini on how to do important research (and win a best-paper award)
No-nonsense Podzorov group advice ("to be successful in [..] research, you cannot be sloppy")

Style manuals from AIP, APS, IEEE, and Nature
NIST checklist for SI units and additional recommendations on style
Nature's one-page guide to writing an abstract, publish like a pro, and write a first-class paper
ACS virtual issue on the Art of Scientific Publication, Part 1 and Part 2
Advice on writing good papers from P. Kamat, S. Senturia, G. Whitesides, and D. Weitz
More scientific writing advice, a guide from SciDev and another from Nature Physics
How to love writing a paper, tell a story, and avoid hype -- plus a blog on writing (science)
An open letter to grad students and other procrastinators: it's time to write
Nature guide to journal article peer review and several more articles about it

How to Get an Academic Job from The Chronicle of Higher Education
HHMI's excellent lab management guide and similar advice from AAAS/Science
A guide to early-career researchers from Elsevier
Tomorrow's Professor, a book about preparing for an academic career (R. Reis, 1997)

Wolfram's integral calculator
ViennaSHE, a free semiconductor device simulator from TU Wien
Programs for extracting data from graphs: Engauge Digitizer, PlotDigitizer, g3data
Raman peak fitting with Fityk (GUI-based) and Peakfit.m (for Matlab/Octave)
Online spreading resistance calculators at Univ. Waterloo
LayoutEditor is a free integrated circuit layout editor
LAMMPS and VMD, free software for Molecular Dynamics simulations

updated Aug 2026