At Authorea we're constantly thinking about how to make research writing easier, faster, and more robust from initial idea all the way through publication. Beyond stressing over making Authorea an impeccable experience and tool for researchers, we also like to think outside of the box for new innovative features that may not be on our immediate radar but are things we'd like to focus on at some point in the near future. Authorea X, if you like.
Today, we'd like to ask for your feedback on one of the new ideas we're working on. We actively sought your feedback when we redesigned our new editor and would like to continue to involve researchers in the development of Authorea as much as possible. After all, we're building a great experience for you!
In our latest brainstorming session, we discussed how we could help researchers improve their writing beyond what we're currently doing. Specifically, how could we make the writing process one informed by data? We identified a few key things we thought were important to the researcher based on requests as well as on our own observations and came up with what we're tentatively calling: "the Authorea Fitbit of research writing."
The Authorea Fitbit of research
While there are numerous metrics aimed at measuring the output of a researcher and the impact of their work
\cite{Abbott_2010}, there is no easy way to track how a researcher is writing. Some researchers have started manually keeping track of their writing progress on Twitter like the online
#acwrimo community or the
"thesis-writing tracker" by Achintya Rao of CERN but this is somewhat laborious and really just added work. We think we can do better than a daily tally. We can automatically track your writing patterns and share with you in a useful dashboard your typical behavior as well as your progress over a certain period of time. With such a system we would hope to be able to provide answers to the following:
- What time do I write most frequently at?
- What are the most common words that I use?
- How frequently do I write?
- How many words am I writing per day, per week, and per year?
These are the things that we think researchers may like to know and thus we started quickly mocking up what this could look like on Authorea. Our mocks are just initial sketches, heavily inspired by Github, and we hope, with your feedback, that they could become something very useful to researchers. What would you track about your writing if you could? Tweet at us
@authorea or leave a comment on Facebook or this article!