Saturday, December 15, 2007
Keeping an eye on how your scientific manuscripts are evolving
In the Research on Research group virtually all of our scientific manuscripts are written in teams, and so the choice of an on-line writing tool is natural. To keep up with how each manuscript is evolving, we find the Google Docs and Spreadsheets gadget probably one of the most useful tools ever. This gadget will sit on your iGoogle homepage, giving you a snapshot of what your collaborators are doing.
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2 comments:
just to add to the post above: one way to really take advantage of shared documents is for mentors to check in daily on 'evolving' manuscripts. a few minutes to glance over the manuscript and to make comments (using control-m) is particularly helpful for novice writers and those unfamiliar with scientific writing. that being said, we've found that even a highly experienced first author (likely leading the writing) finds such input by all authors to be very helpful in developing the manuscript. consider this: by the time a manuscript is submitted for publication (via the peer-review process), it has been reviewed and transformed internally several times over. compared to commenting after a first draft is ready, making comments in Google Docs during manuscript development has been a very efficient tool for our group that has saved time and improved teamwork.
Anand, very interesting comment. By coincidence, I just posted on how a standardized processing of comments to research papers can turn the training of novice researchers into a more streamlined process: http://researchonresearch.blogspot.com/2007/12/training-in-scientific-writing-and_28.html
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