I still remember in the 1980’s how impressed we physicists were when we discovered Tex. The program was written by Donald Knuth. The macro package Tex is so good and complete that all new developments are mere front ends and user interfaces to Tex, of which Latex and AmsTex packages are the most popular. Newer distributions deal with newer hardware, new fonts and better font management, and pdf creation, but the fundament is still Tex.

Those scientists, like chemists and biologists, that use an occasional mathematical formula can do without Tex. All kinds of handy add-ins allow incorporating math formula’s in standard office documents. However, if your paper has many math formula’s the Tex-way is the only solution. In the rest I will limit myself to LaTex.

Abstract
In this post I have tested several solutions for slide sharing. I found the free product of SlideBoom to be superior.

Introduction
Scientific presentations are nowadays delivered in a form where the focus is on the presentation of slides. Old-fashioned people claim  - and complain - that a presentation with blackboard and chalk is a much better form of communication. This almost obsolete style is to be preferred in a limited number of cases only. For instance when you are lecturing to students and you really want to go slowly through a sequential line of arguments, like a full mathematical derivation. In all other cases the era of PowerPoint is a blessing. Both for presenters and for audiences.

The digital formats of a slide presentation allows for reuse by the presenter himself, and for reuse by others. Slide sharing is becoming fashionable. In this post I limit myself to the sharing of the presentation file. So I am not discussing full-blown video presentations.

When you are doing research, you tend to collect a lot of papers. I remember that at the end of m PhD, when I moved to another continent to do a postdoc, I dumped a huge box of photocopies in my parents’ basement. A few years ago, I had collected two cupboards full of photocopies. It was getting seriously out of hand. Then, of course, journals started putting everything online as PDFs and the same process started all over again but this time filling up hard disk folders instead. I used to have subject-based folders, which sort of worked until something fit within 2 or 3 or 4 of my subjects. Searching for some old paper you had read a few years back became more and more nightmarish. Then somebody showed me Papers.

Every scientist has to cope with the problem of managing references (or citations, or notes, or literature, or whatever you call it.)  When writing his second paper he discovers that he has to type a number of references that he already typed in when preparing his first paper. This repetitive action calls for a repository of references. In an ideal world many group members submit their references to this repository and after some time a very efficient storage medium has been created.

Pitfalls
Alas. The real world is never like this. And for many reasons. Typos in entries will live for ever, or will give rise to duplicate entries. Incomplete entries will downgrade the usefulness of the database. Inconsistent use of case (uppercase, lowercase, title case) is causing a mess. Different spelling of names will lead to duplicate entries, or to angry readers when they see their name misspelled in a list of references in an article in a high-impact journal. Many programs (or ‘wizards’) that import references cannot deal with extended characters (leave alone Unicode).  Names with diacritics (like umlauts) are dealt with either inconsistently or wrongly.  Partitioning of names into initials, first names and last names is full of traps and many import filters fall in those traps. In this respect the following error in the book Latex by Leslies Lamport (an excellent book and excellent macro package, of course) is typical: on page 141 (Chapter on “The Bibliography Database”) Lamport discusses “von Beethoven, Ludwig”. The name of course is Ludwig van Beethoven, as the name is of Flemish origin. And indeed “Van” is not his middle name.

Hyperlinks
In my opinion the paper version of the Survival Guide for Scientists is very useful. But some information in the book the reader might also would like to have in digital form. In particular the book contains quite a number of useful hyperlinks. These links the reader would certainly like to be able to click on them in some digital form. Well here they are as a pdf file with all hyperlinks

Sample Chapters
To convince people how useful the Survival Guide for Scientists is, we have prepared some free sample chapters of all three guides in digital form:

We are still working on the full ebook versions.

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of science

Every discovery or invention is based upon previous discoveries or inventions. This is what makes communication so essential for science. ResearchGATE empowers science by connecting the scientific community. Our platform enables researchers to communicate faster, better and easier. This will accelerate the distribution of knowledge – and create new ideas.

ResearchGATE works to the benefit of every scientist

Being connected with co-researchers is a great advantage for every scientist. You can present your profile and your work, manage and extend your professional contacts, join or found groups, ask or answer questions, share or search papers and much more. This collaboration makes everybody’s work much more effective. And it’s free, safe and without spam.

ResearchGATE is designed for the upcoming age of Science 2.0

The tools offered by ResearchGATE are custom-made for researchers. No other platform provides such a wide range of web 2.0 applications exactly matching the needs of the scientific community. New features are constantly added, always state-of-the-art and no-frills. This makes ResearchGATE the best social network choice for scientists.

Scientists’s desk
What general office software is useful for scientists? I come to the following enumeration: an email client, a calendar manager, a browser, a document formatter (for non-scientific papers), a spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft sells software providing all these functionalities, and indeed many scientists use the Microsoft products Outlook, Internet Explorer, MS-Word, MS-Excel and MS-PowerPoint. However, with free - technically speaking - superior products Google is now challenging the leading position of Microsoft in this traditionally Microsoft territory

Tired of Microsoft
After having followed each and every update of the MS-DOS and Windows operating systems for the last thirty (30) years I have had it with Microsoft. I am not going to defend the Redmond boys any longer when my colleagues shame them. On the contrary: I will give my peers additional arguments.

A scientific manuscript will carry in the majority of cases more than one author. In this post I want to describe some of the technical problems associated with multiple authors.  So nothing here about the sociological and psychological aspects of dealing with co-authors. The book, by the way, discusses these aspects in some detail.

Writing after the facts
If everything that had to be done, has been done, all research has been carried out,  all calculations have been performed and all results are available, writing up is a simple process. The first author - and only he - works on the manuscript (Latex-type, or in case of real emergency MS-Word) and after he has finished, the correction process can start. I have explained in my book in detail how to deal with this correction process. But here I want treat a new situation.