Scientific papers are often full of information and data - and rightly so. Proof of the concepts and examples of research are essential in getting the author’s point across to the reader.
This information isn’t always easy for a reader to digest, however, with pages of raw data making for a poor narrative. This was an issue identified by John Kitchin, a professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and which he took it upon himself to fix.
The Scimax software is a set of authoring tools for scientific reports, designed to help automatically develop the data in academic papers into readable text, without the need for knowledge of advanced coding.
The software will integrate narrative text with data, code, figures, equations, tables and citations, all of which will be coded directly into the document and easily accessible. Code is run directly in the document, capturing the output and seamlessly integrating it with the prose that explains the data - rather than having one follow the other. The document can act as both a presentation of the information as well as a source of data, while still being able to export to popular formats including HTML, LaTeX, PDF or MS Word.
The best part is that the software is open source, and available to anyone to use and adapt for their own use, which will benefit engineering and science students as well as their professors and other professionals. Kitchin is serious about data sharing in academia.
Scimax could help bring scientific publishing into a new era, making better use of the technology available. It can also help as a teaching aid, potentially finding use in digital textbooks with more data available to students, and will help share information with other academics in a digestible way.
Whether it will become the new norm in publishing is unknown, but moving beyond pages of plain text could help not only make academic papers more accessible, but allow more, better organized data and proofs to be integrated without sacrificing readability.
“Right around the time I got tenure, I started looking at what the next 20 years of my research could look like if I stayed on the trajectory I had been on in my career,” says Kitchin. “I knew a lot was possible, but I felt like I’d hit a plateau in productivity. I couldn’t find any software out there that did what I needed, so I created Scimax.”
Kitchin and his team have also written two papers about Scimax and its ability to disseminate scientific data, available in ACS Catalysis and the International Journal on Digital Libraries.
For more information, check out the Kitchin Research Group webpage, or the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.