A Survey of User Expectations and Tool Limitations in Collaborative Scientific Authoring and Reviewing

Collaborative scientific authoring is increasingly being supported by software tools. Traditionally, desktop-based authoring tools had the most advanced editing features, allowed for more formatting options, and included more import/export filters. Web-based tools have excelled in their collaboration support. Recently, developers on both sides have been trying to close this gap by extending desktop-based tools to better support collaboration and by making web-based tools richer in functionality. To verify to what extent these developments actually meet the needs of researchers, we gathered precise requirements towards better tool support for scientific authoring and reviewing workflows by interviewing 213 users and studying a corpus of 27 documents. We present the design of the survey and interpret its results. The conclusion is that WYSIWYG and offline desktop authoring tools continue to be more popular among academics than text-based and online editors.