Analysis and news
‘A software geek at heart’ Emily Marchant from Cambridge University Press speaks to Matias Piipari, the founder of an online writing tool called Manuscripts designed for the authoring of academic texts
Tell us about your background I completed my PhD in Cambridge at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in computational biology after being an undergraduate in biochemistry in Imperial College. In short, I am a biologist by training but really a software geek at heart, eventually starting my first company during my PhD with a colleague, making iPhone apps. I then joined as an early employee of Papers (http://papersapp. com), creators of a multiple award-winning reference manager that was picking up popularity at the time. I have happily spent the five years since on creating scientific productivity tools, learning a great deal in the process.
What is Manuscripts and why did you create it? Manuscripts (
http://manuscriptsapp.com) is a user-friendly writing tool that helps authors create and manage complex scholarly documents, from outlining and writing a research paper to editing and proofreading it, as well as putting it through the publishing stages. I created Manuscripts because I noticed as a researcher how limited word processing tools, such as MS Word, and workflows that use text mark up editing are for modern scholarly writing. These tools, which were designed
for creating relatively short linear text documents, are being used to write long, complex documents such as theses, books and peer reviewed articles. When it comes to scholarly actions such as citing external sources, cross-referencing, and writing formulae, these legacy tools are actually really weak.
Why would an author want to use Manuscripts over Word, for example? Because Manuscripts saves time and lets you focus on the essential issue, which is the scholarly narrative in your paper. It does this by taking a lot of mundane formatting tasks away. You will not find the seven ribbons of nonsensical buttons from MS Word; you will not need to learn
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LaTeX to write your paper; you can just get going and create your entire paper in the app. To name one standout feature,
Manuscripts has the best citation workflow anywhere: you can use the internal citation tool, Papers, Mendeley, EndNote, F1000Workspace, Bookends or Zotero to cite, without leaving the app. If you’re writing a paper with other people, you can use any combination of these tools. This kind of understanding of scholarly workflow details is what we pride ourselves on. Another feature we get a lot of positive
feedback about is the outlining feature; you can navigate your manuscript, reorder its sections and paragraphs directly in a sort of live table of contents view in the app, as well as, of course, putting together a rough outline for your paper.
What makes Manuscripts stand out from other authoring tools and apps? The emphasis we give to a clean yet powerful user interface is the most obvious difference between us and other scholarly tools. This is not a tool ‘designed by scientists for scientists’, as the cliché goes. Manuscripts was designed by a team that has won multiple awards, such
“You can just get going and create
l The document internally reflects the semantic structure of a research paper. For instance, the outline, document body, contributor and bibliography metadata are all cleanly separate. This becomes invaluable, for example, when the article is rejected or you want to change citation styles, as it enables us to reformat documents semi- automatically; and
l Overall, our goal in building Manuscripts was to make it super simple to get started, hide away complexity and offer powerful solutions on a deeper level, available when you need them.
Does an author have to be from a technical background to use Manuscripts? Definitely not. Manuscripts users are lawyers, medical doctors, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, human and social sciences researchers, novelists, high school students and many more. This is the only scholarly writing tool that’s genuinely simple enough to be used for many other purposes, too.
your entire paper in the app”
as the Apple Design Award and Arts Design Award. To us, this is as important as our understanding of researchers; the combination of design and engineering is what empowers our users. To give some
examples: l A Manuscripts document includes a complete version history inside it. Users can revert back to any version of the document at any time;
To what extent can Manuscripts help researchers manage and format citations? Manuscripts formats citations for you automatically, with more than 8,000 citation styles included in the app. It also allows you to import your reference library directly with two clicks from Papers, Mendeley, Zotero Bookends, F1000Workspace and EndNote. However, unlike legacy word processors it also keeps the citations and bibliography data cleanly separate from the manuscript body text, in its version- controlled bibliography database that is stored inside the document. This means that you can reformat or edit citations easily, all within the same app. You can also use a combination of citation tools among your co-authors when writing with Manuscripts, so that the tool suits everyone.
What Manuscripts isn’t, though, is a
centralised reference manager. References are stored locally in the manuscript to make it possible for you to collaborate among your co-authors on a paper,
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