[App Intro] Manuscripts.io – Authoring tool for complex documents and scientific papers

For editing complex documents that contain headings, chapters, equations, formulae, inserting and managing citations & references, exporting to different journal formats, etc, etc. How about the collaboration abilities of multiple people editing the same document at the same time? Then you need this app.

Manuscripts.io is a free, online-only app for authoring complex documents, (although you can use it for simple purposes like editing an essay, article, blog post) especially academic/research papers, thesis/dissertations, books, scientific papers, formatting academic books, and many more use cases.

Interface & Experience

Easy drag and drop chapters (from left sidebar) to reorder your content with ease, when doing the reordering thing, the chapter and figure numbers are automatically adjusted corresponding to the changes. You can add author details with ease and change the format of the document for submission to different publishers who have different formatting (like two column layouts, citation style etc). It has more than hundreds of pre-built standard styles of various scienctific journals. Editing a research paper is a peice of cake when you use this app.

Highly intuitive interface with easy upload options for images and naming and numbering, LaTex equations, inline-table data edit, and many more.

Reference and Citations

So far it is the best tool I’ve ever used for authoring my research papers. The coolest function for me is, you can cite any paper which is indexed in CrossRef, PubMed, Datacite without manually editing the details of cited papers. Apart from that, you can import references from all major ‘Reference managers’ (also called as ‘Citation manager’) like Zotero, EndNote, JabRef or anything that can export in ‘bibtex’ format.

Obviously, it supports LaTex editing too. An all-in-one authoring tool focused for science and research.

NOTE: below video is 5 years old, the app has went through many updates and it is supercool than it looks in the video. The video is just to give the idea how this app will work.

Collaboration

You know how Google Docs’ collaboration functionality of multiple people editing same document at the same time. This app offers the same feature, (close to seamless standard). This is top-notch feature for many collaborative researchers.

Cons

Web only app, (it has a Mac app, which is also webapp runs inside a container) and your data is stored online. The privacy policy of the site states that they will not use your data for any purpose, yet it is still risky to share your confidential research data to a third party. In future, if they save the data in encrypted format, then I would strongly recommend this app for everyone.

Visit Manuscripts.io