It's a challenge to manage courses, work with graduate students, do groundbreaking research, serve on committees, and most importantly, teach for more than 20 hours every week!

So, it's not surprising that many professors don't want to invest any time or emotional energy on a slavish activity like research paper formatting. We spoke to a lot of professors and people who work in the academic environment about writing research, specifically, their experiences with formatting research papers manually. Few of them mentioned -

It is a waste of time. Fiddling with margins, fonts, boldface is not the author’s job. The author should worry about the meaning of what s/he is writing, not the format. By playing with your word processor, you are indulging in something that doesn’t give that much satisfaction and certainly does not increase your productivity.

You can notice that, in recent times, many professors are moving away from formatting a research paper manually. So, why would someone, with years of research experience, want to move to a new way of writing? Here are 5 reasons why.

1. They Publish a lot of Research Papers

Academic professors work on many research projects and publish several quality research papers in a year. Formatting each of these articles manually and adhering to a publication manual, following specific citation style guides like APA, MLA, or Chicago takes a lot of time and energy.

Using the journal templates at SciSpace (formerly Typeset) frees you from having a frustrating experience every time you write a research paper.

I love the idea of a program that can format your article automatically. I am an assistant professor at a university. Manual formatting takes up a lot of time and has been a major problem.

- Professor, Medical University — Plovdiv

Every journal has its formatting guidelines and citation styles. Some require you to send your paper in APA style, some in MLA, while others in Chicago. Auto-formatting your research paper with a SciSpace template lets you adhere to any style guidelines without any fuss. Also, it gives you a structured research paper that creates an impact. You'll never hear of a paper getting rejected because it was correctly formatted.

2. Collaborating with Many Contributors

The best science is performed by collaboration of researchers with different expertise.

I recall writing my first journal paper for my university. Preparing a final draft that my professor, a colleague, and I could mutually agree on took five weeks! Almost all the professors and students face the same issue.

Being on the same page about every statement, methods, summary, citation, table, and footnote requires constant communication. The ability to swiftly examine the work is necessary when you are collaborating with people while you write your thesis. Collaborating over many emails and sharing files is both time taking and frustrating. It delays publishing your paper for no reason.

I’m a professor and work with colleagues and students on papers. Some collaborators are local; others are international. Many of the docs are on Google docs or Overleaf for the techies. Others (which give me fits) are mailed round-robin.

- Professor, Simon Fraser University

A collaborative platform brings co-authors, colleagues, students, and sponsors on the same document. Everyone can visualize changes as soon as they happen. Better collaboration results in a faster output that everybody agrees on.

SciSpace is one such platform where you can quickly collaborate with your colleagues and work on your article without delays.

3. The Need to Code

A paper written in LaTeX is far superior to the one prepared in a word processor. Furthermore, if you come from a mathematical or computing background, you may need to include formulae and symbols in your work, which a standard word processor just can't handle. In such cases, LaTeX is a must.

But LaTeX requires coding and not many professors are comfortable to use coding for formatting their research paper. Learning to write in LaTeX takes a lot of time and effort on your part.

Even though tools like Overleaf and ShareLaTeX have made it a little easier, you still need to learn the language to be able to use them. If you are not working in a field that requires you to learn LaTeX, it’s not worth it. One of the authors at SciSpace has put it very well:

The learning curve for LaTeX is so steep that becoming an experienced user who can leverage those capabilities often takes more time than many users can afford. Also, even for an experienced user, there are a number of tasks while using LaTeX that can be automated. SciSpace promises to solve both challenges and hence provides benefits for both newbies and expert LaTeX users towards fulfilling writing experience.

- Researcher, Aalto University

Rather than breaking your head on learning to code or using such complicated tools for formatting your research paper, you can simplify the formatting process by using SciSpace instead of manually coding.

4. Reformatting for Individual Journals

Rejection of a research paper is a disappointing but common part of academia. But the most painful part is reformatting. Sometimes, you might have to adapt to a new paper format altogether.

So, instead spending time ensuring that your font size is 12 points or the text is double spaced, you can use tools like SciSpace. Rewriting the entire journal paper in a different format is not required. You can simply change the current journal format to another (from a choice of 40,000+ journal templates), and within seconds, the paper is ready for submission in another journal.

I spent hours with MS word for reformatting. It was frustrating — plain and simple. With SciSpace, I can draft my manuscripts and once it is finished I can just submit. In case, I have to submit to another Journal it is really just a button click instead of an afternoon of reformatting.

- Researcher, ETH Zurich

5. Clarity in Composition

This is perhaps the most important reason behind the shift.

Performing and communicating new research is one thing. Typesetting is another.
With the latter taken care of, an author can look at a manuscript for what it communicates without worrying about how it would look.

Writing in a WYSIWYM editor instead of a WYSIWYG processor makes you think only about the expression of ideas. Building the logical structure in words is much easier when you have one goal in mind.

At SciSpace, we help researchers reduce the chances of research paper rejection. One of the ways we do this is by auto-formatting your content to 100% of the journal guidelines, in a click.

SciSpace is a software developed to streamline publication workflows. Using SciSpace, publishers are able to automatically convert author submissions to any publication format, including JATS XML. SciSpace publisher offers solutions to generate XML-first articles that comply with major scientific databases like PubMed, Crossref, and Scopus.

SciSpace publisher works with 400+ journals worldwide and offers solutions for generating XML-first articles. You can simplify your workflow and save over 80% of the time and cost of producing research papers.

You can learn more about what we do and how we help you in your research writing here.

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