2 min read

Tools for Academic Writing - Comparison

2017/04/26

Many tools exist for academic writing including the notorious W.O.R.D.; but many more are out there. Let’s have a look at those tools, and discuss what’s important (what we expect the tool to deliver, eg., beautiful typesetting).

Typical tools for academic writing

  • MS Word: A “classical” choice, relied upon by myriads of white collar workers… I myself have used it extensively for academic writing; the main advantage being its simplicity, that is, well, everybody knows it, and knows more or less how to handle it. It’s widespread use is of course an advantage.

  • TeX: The purist’s choice. The learning curve can be steep, but its beauty and elegance of typesetting if unreached.

  • Overleaf, Authorea: Web-based apps that make it easy to enjoy modern functionality by making the entry hurdle as low as possible. These riches do not come for free; commercial organizations would like to see some return of investment.

  • Full: With the “full” approach I refer to a blended version of several tools, mainly:

    • R
    • RStudio
    • RMarkdown (ie., knitr + markdown + pandoc)
    • Git + Github
    • stylesheets such as papaja (APA6 stylesheet)

  • Markdown: Markdown is a simple variant of markup languages such as HTLM or LaTeX. Its marked feature is its simplicity. In fact, it can be learned in 5 minutes (whereas TeX may need 5-50 years, some say…).

  • Google Docs: Easy, no (direct) costs, comfortable, but some features are lacking - There’s no easy for citations. In addition, some say intellectual rights are transferred to Google by using G Docs (I have no clue whether that’s true).

Tool comparison table

libs <- c("readr", "tidyverse", "pander", "emo", "htmlTable")
pacman::p_load(char = libs)

tools <- read_csv("academic_writing_tools_competition.csv")

htmlTable(df)

Criterion weight

Let’s assume we have some weights that we assign to the critera:

Scores by tool

So we are able to devise a score or a ranking.

score %>% ggplot + aes(x = reorder(tool_name, score), y = score) + 
    geom_point() + coord_flip() + xlab("tool")

And the winner is…

The full approach. The full approach gets most points (disclaimer: well, I designed this competition, and I like this approach 😄.

Getting started

There are numerous tutorial on “the full approach” out there, .eg.