12

The Mathematica notebook is a great avenue for inspiring and realising research ideas. However, I do feel there are several missing jigsaws in the picture of writing academic paper fully in Mathematica:

  1. citation management: there is one but in fact broken on Mac; it would be great to integrate the CSL approach.
  2. references and captions for figures/tables: (at least I haven't figured out how to manage this). One ideal example can be found in the pandoc world using pandoc-crossref, which I find is very sleek.

So I'm wondering how can we build a sleek workflow in pure Mathematica for academic paper writing?

One recent promising effort might be M2MD that can convert a notebook into a markdown file, which may shed some light in implementation of the wanted features above.

sunt05
  • 4,367
  • 23
  • 34
  • 2
    You explained what you would like to achieve, but maybe it is good to say why you want to go this way? – yarchik Jun 04 '20 at 15:34
  • @yarchik I would prefer a one-stop solution for my research production. Jupyter notebook in a sense can be a good alternative but I do prefer Mathematica as my top one research workshop. – sunt05 Jun 04 '20 at 15:36
  • Unusual question? It is hard managing Notebooks, LaTeX documents, (citations) reference management, and how to best distribute? (PDF, e-PUB?, Notebook??) It would be nice if there was an easy answer. Wolfram Language and CDFs are all about "sharing maths" in a browser. Maybe start there? Wish had better news, but it seems to be destined to always be a struggle? – prog9910 Jun 04 '20 at 15:39
  • But some journals prefer docx format, others prefer LaTeX and even provide style files. Is it cost management? I am not using it, but it seems MSWord is pretty cheap nowadays.. – yarchik Jun 04 '20 at 15:40
  • I was wondering at least a pathway to other easier channels can be built within Mathematica, e.g., the M2MD package I mentioned in the question for exporting notebooks to markdown: given the popularity of markdown and its technical variants, it might be possible for academic writing in Mathematica? – sunt05 Jun 04 '20 at 15:42
  • I use a Wiki to keep URLs straight and easy to self-comment and document. Browser data should be maintained and viewed in a browser. Jupyter seems very interesting & Kubernetes. Chio – prog9910 Jun 04 '20 at 15:46
  • @yarchik, yes, it's absolutely true docx is preferred by quite a few journals. If we can export nb to docx, it would be appreciated. And pandoc can be the nexus for a bunch of such conversion: it's just the gateway from Mathematica to pandoc is largely missing. – sunt05 Jun 04 '20 at 15:46
  • 2
    I'd argue against this. A mathematica notebook is not among the accepted formats for any of the journals I publish in (chemistry) and, I suspect, for math and physics $\LaTeX$ reigns supreme, with MS Word files coming second. Practically speaking, you would have to reconstruct the authoring toolchain from scratch, only to get to a practically unusable final product in its native format that would still have to be exported / converted. Publishing houses want editable submissions, so converting to e.g. PDF would not be enough. – MarcoB Jun 04 '20 at 15:56
  • 3
    Also, mutability for a manuscript authoring tool might be attractive in the short run, but is probably not a very good idea: a few years down the line some package breaks / some incompatible changes are made, and you no longer can access / edit / work with your original manuscript. Also, by definition everybody in your field has access to the "normal" most common authoring tools, so collaboration is easy if you use those, but horribly painful otherwise. And Mathematica is emphatically not a common manuscript authoring tool. – MarcoB Jun 04 '20 at 15:59
  • I wouldn't look at Wolfram tech as a tool for conventional paper writing. But it is definitely capable at publishing research in a more modern media format. Take a look at https://distill.pub/ for example. – swish Jun 04 '20 at 17:19
  • But magazines only need docx or pdf... – XinBae Jun 05 '20 at 02:08

0 Answers0