Research and collaboration tools and databases that are particularly helpful for strategic foresight or futures research.

Top Web Tools We Recommend (a very incomplete list).
DOAJ. Directory of Open Access Journals, scientific and scholarly. Full text. Free.
Docstoc. Sharing business, legal, and other professional documents. Free.
GDocs and Spreadsheets. Good basic collaboration platform. Free.
GMail and GCalendar. Clean, fast, reasonably full-featured. Free basic.
GModerator. Good tool to gather and prioritize opinions and voting on talks, presentations and events. Free.
GReader. Great tool for organizing RSS feeds and tracking site updates. Free.
iGoogle. Fast, customizable, reasonably useful home page. Free.
LibraryThing. Catalog & find others with the same books. Free basic. 200K users.
Linqia. Search tool to find global online groups and social networks, by keyword interest.
Ning. Create your own full-featured social networks. Free.
Plaxo Pulse. FB-like business network. Free. 13M Plaxo users (not Pulse).
Slideshare. Largest community for publicly sharing your presentations. Free.
SmugMug. Best fee-based online photosharing. Document your life. $40/yr. 300K users.
Spock. A search tool for finding people by interest. Free. 80M "indexed" people.
Wetpaint. Easy personal or enterprise wikis. Free basic. 600K wikis (+ this site).
Xing. For business networking. Free basic. 4M users.
Yelp. Good reviews of local businesses and services. Democracy in action! Free.

Open Citation Management
CiteULike
A free online service to organise and share references to academic papers. Easy to use. RIS, RSS, BibTeX output.
Zotero
A free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.

Reference
CIA World Factbook
Authoritative source for country estimates, updated annually.
Congresspedia
Community-developed citizens encyclopedia wiki on congress
FedStats
Statistical data from over 100 U.S. agencies, and by topic.
Library of Congress (Online Catalog)
Can look up LC classification numbers for any valued book in your home library. Look it up here, see what else with a similar title you are missing! Even more extensive than Amazon's database (for now at least).
Sourcewatch
Community- developed wiki on public relations firms influencing public policy.
U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States
Authoritative statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. 125 years.
Wikipedia
The largest online collaborative encyclopedia.

Research
DataThief
Great tool for reverse-engineering graphics to get the data points.

Search
Google
Your best link to the emerging digital universe. Try all the cool beta sites.
Google Scholar
Search scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, etc.
NLM Gateway/Medline
National library of medicine. Vast database of health, nursing, and biomedical science research.

Free Databases
arXiv.org
Electronic preprint archive for physics, math, computer science, quant. biology, and other subjects. Over 100,000 articles.
Cordis
Collaboration database linking much of European Science and Technology R&D and funding.
Pub Med Central
NIH's free database of life sciences publications.
Scientific Commons
Free archive of scientific publications. Over 22 million.

Subscription Databases
Hundreds of quality subscription databases can be accessed at any large university or public library. Here are a few:
ABI/INFORM
A database covering business, management, economics and related fields. Journals, magazines, dissertations, newspapers, etc. ProQuest.
JSTOR
Rapidly growing online database of multidisciplinary and discipline specific journals. Insitutitional access, limited individual access.
LexisNexis
Comprehensive legal, news, business and public record information.
PsycINFO
An abstract (not full-text) database of psychological literature from the 1800s to the present.
ScienceDirect
Largest fee-based electronic collection of science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information. Elsevier.
Scopus
Large abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources. Elsevier.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
Large collection of online social science research. Free abstracts, some free papers, many paid.
Web of Science/Science Citations Index
Track any paper and see who else has referenced it since publication. Surf the memespace of idea evolution. Free access only at major research libraries.


Know any others that should be on this list? Log in and add them yourself. Please follow the same formatting and style you see on these pages, with very brief explanatory sentences. If you can't do that, please put them in the threads section at the bottom of the page, thanks.