Eight Tools for Editing STEM Research

As a professional editor, I annually edit about 1.5 million words of research on computer science and engineering topics. The tools I use must work well, and believe me, I’ve tried a few! In this article, I share the platforms and programs I frequently use for editing research, which I suspect would be useful for writing research as well.

Microsoft Word and LaTeX

In the good old days when research workstations were real Sun Sparcstations and monitors were black and white and shaped like sugar cubes, if you wanted a computer-science research paper to look good, LaTeX was your only option. Although I have a lot of affection for LaTeX, decades have passed since then, and Microsoft Word is now my primary editing tool. I often edit LaTeX documents directly, but every company I work for actually converts the TEX files to Word documents first.

This is primarily because of Word’s tracked-changes feature, a tool that marks deleted text by changing it to red strikethough font and inserted text to red underlined font. As far as I know, there is nothing comparable elsewhere (OpenOffice’s Word clone excepted).

Also gone are the days when precise control over documents and the editing interface was not possible in Word. Although many quirks remain, templates and macros allow you to customize your document to a high degree. In fact, many journals now accept Word documents and even provide Word templates.