Abstract
Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s everyday life. In this paper we investigate the particularities of scientific writing and explore the features and limitations of existing tools for scientific writing. Deriving from this analysis and an online survey of the scientific writing processes of students and researchers at the University of Paderborn, we identify key principles to simplify scientific writing and reviewing. Finally, we introduce a novel approach to support scientific writing with a tool called SciFlow that builds on these principles and state of the art technologies like cloud computing.
Highlights
Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s life
In order to gain a deeper understanding of how scientific writing is accomplished, which tools are being used and how authors rate the strengths and weaknesses of the tools they are using, we carried out a survey (N = 1,603) amongst students and researchers from the University of Paderborn in September 2009
In the following we only present the specific results for Microsoft Word and LATEX, reflecting their high percentages of use
Summary
Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s life. Depending on the particular field of study, papers have to be written and written assignments have to be handed in. While the possibility to work on the same document in real time may be useful in some situations, in a scientific writing setting, the lack of support for reference management and figures is a serious limitation. The concept has to concern itself with a method of (1) input, meaning it has to provide a word processor that can structure text and manage figures as well as references (planing, writing and editing phase) It has to offer a method for (2) review when an author decides to share his work as a PDF, a printout or a website (review phase). The fourth primary issue is (4) flexibility This means that the concept has to be able to scale (e.g., document size, number of users) as well as be portable and maintainable, so it may be updated for specific tasks related to scientific writing (e.g., support for mathematical equations). Each of these explanations will be followed by a description of how the concept has been implemented as part of the first SciFlow prototype
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