Academic Productivity

Citation copy-editing is one of those deceptively small burdens that have a way of taking over the working day. If left untended, the task of tidying up casually scribbled references can snowball to crisis proportions as a submission deadline approaches. Similarly, when a submission to one publisher is unsuccessful, significant effort may be required to recast its citations in the format required by another. Collaboration outside of one’s own field can bring with it an unwelcome tangle of fresh style-guide quandaries to ponder and fight through. These are things that the machines, if they want to make themselves useful, should be doing for us.

There is plenty of collective experience in this line, and as fate would have it, there are also plenty of collective solutions. In the TeX/LaTeX world, authors and their editors can today choose between BibTeX and BibLaTeX — both of them excellent utilities — with the several variants of the former supported by no fewer than four separate versions of the BibTeX program. [1] Users of WYSIWYG word processors can look to the bibliographic support built into Word or Open Office, or they can turn to an external solution such as EndNote ™, ProCite ™, Reference Manager ™, or more recently Zotero or Mendeley. Migrating data between these environments is a process fraught with uncertainty, but it is sometimes unavoidable when you need this kind of output, and it can only be produced on that kind of system …

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When I started my DPhil, I set myself assignments in order to cover the lit review in easy bite-sized chunks. This worked pretty well but the collated material was scattered across different Word documents, which meant that I couldn’t look at everything at one glance or search the content.

However at about the same time, I also started free-writing to generate ideas. If you’re not familiar with the technique, it’s simply writing for a fixed amount of time without stopping. You don’t delete anything on the fly and just go, writing down anything that comes to mind until the timer sounds or your wrists cramp up, whichever comes first.

Instead of putting this writing into Word documents though, I decided to set up a local installation of the blogging engine Movable Type. In retrospect, I think this was probably just an excuse to play with blogging software but it turned out to be a good decision. I could add content from any computer with access to the server, the basic input form meant that I focused on content not style, and of course, I had all the blogging bells-and-whistles attached. Comments could be added at a later date, the information sorted and searched, shared with my supervisor and so on.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it at the time but I would now recommend combining the two ideas: use a blog to write your lit review. (I say “write”, but I really mean “draft”. The structure of blog writing is quite different from academic writing and besides, you’ll want to tidy up references, tables, etc. for the final version. But a blog post is still big enough to cover the bulk of the material and help you organize your thoughts.)

The final stumbling block of course is how to get the content out of the blogging engine and into a presentable format. Fortunately, there’s a script called WPTEX that will convert your Wordpress blog into a LaTeX document. I found this software about six months ago and it does what it says on the tin: give it some basic details and it will parse all of your posts, tidying up the code and creating LaTeX source files which you can then compile as a standalone PDF book or for inclusion as part of your thesis.

The script’s not perfect and I can think of several improvements, particularly in the way that it converts URLs for paper presentation. But if you’re starting a PhD, I’d recommend giving it a go. A blog-sized lit review is a great way to manage this difficult task and of course, if you make the blog public, you can engage with the wider community in your field, getting feedback and maybe even making a bit of a name for yourself. Happy blogging!

My colleague Alastair is conducting a survey about online academic collaboration, use of tools and attitudes to technology in the Academia as part of the Qlectives project. All participants who supply an email address (and complete the questionnaire by the 14 November) will be entered into a prize draw.
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About two years ago we talked about filehamster. It was  free, unobtrusive, and simpler than doing version control ‘by hand’ (adding numbers to filenames) or ‘by machine’ (using a proper versioning tool such as subversion or mercurial).

Well, since then filehamster has moved on to be a pain in the ass. Now the free version nags you a lot, and the paid versions are not really giving us any outstanding features. Plus as a .NET application, it eats up RAM.

Enter AutoVer. Completely freeware, no nags, and a much better interface to boot. The GUI and options make more sense too. I even use it for coding when I’m doing something small and a mercurial repo would be overkill.

Eventually, all writing applications should enable smooth versioning and real-time collaboration (Office 2010 beta does! Wave and etherpad are not alone anymore). The slider that controls versioning as in a time machine is fantastic. AutoVer would not give you that. The AutoVer model also breaks when you send the manuscript to a collaborator, and he edits it on his machine (often changing the file name). Still, it’s much better than not doing versioning at all or doing it by hand.

By the way, does anyone know an alternative that is cross-platform?

Google Scholar is probably the most useful tool on the web today for academics. However, there’s no API for it, and seems to add little to no features with time. I don’t think Google is going to give it the Axe any time soon, but … I can’t imagine ads getting clicked on scholar pages. And Google is a for-profit, so one never knows. In any case, it would not hurt to show Google that we care, and there’s one simple thing to do. If you want to support the creation of the API, you could drop by the google API forums and express your interest.