Social media is generally discouraged in science today. A recent article, "I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer" castigated scholars with active online social lives. Most advisors won't ask you to "tweet out our paper" or "write a blog post about our findings" and it's likely that you'd close Twitter or Reddit if your colleague or advisor walked by. Some conferences have taken it so far as to enforce a "no tweeting" policy. But social networking is here to stay and will likely become even more integrated into our lives and research.

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 researchWhile 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! 

Dear Editor,Herein is my response to manuscript ID XXXXX, entitled [“Why Hermione was better than Harry in almost every respect”] [by Ronald Frump and colleagues] to the [Journal of Squirrel-Puppy Relationships].The authors present [insert general overview of research and key findings]. This research is [well-suited/not-suitable] for the remit of the journal.[Insert any comments regarding potential conflicts of interest, or about areas of relevant expertise that you feel you are lacking].I recommend [accept/minor revisions/major revisions/oblivion], pending x, y, and z.Basic reportingFiguresAre the figures legible, relevant, and integrated into the textDataAre the supporting data included in the manuscript or in a relevant repositoryAre the data presented in a way that is consistent with the FAIR principles (https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples)Experimental designWas the way in which the research was conducted the best way to answer the relevant questionsValidity of the findingsAre the conclusions supported by the resultsDo the results contribute to the research field, irrespective of whether they are ‘negative’ or a replication studyGeneral commentsIs the language used appropriate for a scientific publicationIs the structure appropriateAbstractIs the abstract concise, and does it convey the main research findingsAre any key points of context or conclusions missingIntroductionDoes this cover the published literature sufficientlyDoes it provide enough context in which to place the current researchAre any key citations missingIs the history of the research conveyed at all for historical significanceDoes it finish with a paragraph summarising the relevance of the current researchMaterials and methodsAre the methods clear and easy to followCan the methods be replicated if neededAre the source materials/data openly available, and is appropriate justification provided if notWere any statistical analyses applied performed appropriatelyResultsAre the results presented in a coherent fashionAre the results reported in a way that is supported by the dataDiscussionAre the new results placed into context of the relevant literatureIs a balanced argument providedAre the full implications of the new results discussed in sufficient detailConclusionsAre the conclusions supported by the resultsAre they concise and written in an impactful way (not over-embellished)Additional commentsAnything else you want to add that doesn’t fit aboveCongratulations to the authors on a great piece of work, and I look forward to seeing their research [published/rejected/re-written with all of the references to my own tangentially-relevant work included.]Sincerely,[Ralph Lauren]ReferencesAny additional papers you have cited within your report

BROOKLYN, NY, March 28, 2017 – Authorea, an online collaborative editor for research documents, has partnered with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to offer one-click direct submission of articles written on Authorea to a collection of leading earth and space science journals published by AGU.AGU, founded in 1919, is a not-for-profit professional organization representing 60,000 members in 137 countries. AGU publishes over 6,000 articles annually across its catalog of journals. Authorea has now integrated direct submission to the following AGU journals:• Earth and Space Science• Earth’s Future• Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems• GeoHealth• Geophysical Research Letters• Global Biogeochemical Cycles• Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems• Journal of Geophysical Research:        – Atmospheres        – Biogeosciences        – Earth Surface        – Oceans        – Planets        – Space Physics        – Solid Earth• Paleoceanography• Radio Science• Reviews of Geophysics• Space Weather• TectonicsAuthorea provides industry leading writing tools for researchers. Authors may write in multiple markup languages (including richtext, Markdown, and LaTeX), can search and insert citations from the web or from another reference manager, and can insert data sources and rich media into the document itself.The partnership streamlines the formatting and submission process for authors. Whereas before authors could spend hours or days formatting documents to meet submission requirements, Authorea automatically formats, packages, and sends submissions to the journal, greatly reducing the time cost of submission for authors.Josh Nicholson, Chief Research Officer at Authorea, says: “We’re excited to partner and work with AGU to make the editing and submission of research articles easier and more efficient for earth and space science researchers. AGU publishes some of the world’s most important research and we’re excited to integrate to make publishing more streamlined and effective.”Brooks Hanson, Director of Publications at AGU, says: “As a leader in scientific collaboration and innovative publishing, we’re always looking for ways to improve our publications, scientific collaboration, and the experience for our authors. In partnering with Authorea, AGU provides our authors and researchers with another tool to simplify the submission process allowing them to spend more time focused on their research and less on formatting submissions.”Press ContactAdyam Ghebre, Outreach, Authorea+1 (646) 598-9285About AuthoreaAuthorea is the online document editor for research and the place where scientific collaboration happens. Authorea is trusted worldwide by leading researchers writing and publishing content in every discipline, from astrophysics to zoology. The online document editor supports a wide range of markup languages and scientific integrations, including the most popular citation management, graphing, and visualization plugins. Authorea is on a mission to accelerate science through a superior web-based research-writing platform that delivers powerful tools and capabilities to researchers.

PYTHAGORAS’ THEOREM a² + b² = c² _Pythagoras, 530 BC_ -------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ --------- LOGARITHMS logxy = logx + logy _John Napier, 1610_ CALCULUS $ f}{ t} = {h}$ _Newton, 1668_ LAW OF GRAVITY $F = G {r^2}$ _Newton, 1687_ THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS ONE i² = −1 _Euler, 1750_ EULER’S FORMULA FOR POLYHEDRA V − E + F = 2 _Euler, 1751_ NORMAL DISTRIBUTION $\psi(x) = {} e^{2~\rho^2}$ _C. F. Gauss, 1810_ WAVE EQUATION ${\partial t^2} = c^2 {\partial x^2}$ _J. D‘Ambert, 1746_ FOURIER TRANSFORM f(ω)=∫−∞∞f(x)e−2 π i x ωdx _J. Fourier, 1822_ NAVIER-STOKES EQUATION $\rho \left ( }{\partial t} + \cdot \nabla \right ) = - \nabla p + \nabla \cdot T + f$ _C. Navier, G. Stokes, 1845_ MAXWELL’S EQUATIONS ∇ ⋅ E = 0 _J. C. Maxwell, 1865_ $\nabla \times E = - {e} {\partial t}$ ∇ ⋅ H = 0 $\nabla \times H = {e} {\partial t}$ SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS dS ≥ 0 _L. Boltzmann, 1874_ PAYWALL RELATIVITY E = mc² _Einstein, 1905_ PAYWALL SCHRÖDINGER’S EQUATION $ \hbar {\partial t} \psi = H \psi$ _E. Schrödinger, 1927_ PAYWALL INFORMATION THEORY H = −∑p(x)logp(x) _C. Shannon, 1949_ PAYWALL CHAOS THEORY xt + 1 = k xt(1 − xt) _Robert May, 1975_ PAYWALL BLACK-SCHOLES EQUATION ${2} \sigma^2 S^2 {\partial S^2} + r S {\partial S} + {\partial t} - r V = 0$ _F. Black, M. Scholes, 1990_ PAYWALL EULER’S TRANSFORMATION $^\infty (-1)^n a_n = ^\infty (-1)^n {2^{n+1}}$ _Euler, 1755_ PAYWALL RUSSELL’S PARADOX Let R = {x ∣ x ∉ x}, then R ∈ R ⇔ R ∉ R _Russell, 1902_ GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM G(x):=¬Prov(sub(x, x)) ⇒ PA ⊢ G(⌜G⌝) ↔ ¬Prov(⌜G(⌜G⌝)⌝) _Gödel, 1931_

The vast majority of academic researchers write their research in Microsoft Word \cite{Pepe_2016}. Word is easy to use due to its what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, however it is limited in many ways that are necessary for effectively communicating research. It necessitates the use of publishers (some of which have very antiquated models) and it limits the capability to collaborate and share data. Furthermore, it means that proper research publishing and indexing will always be costly as the conversion from Word to HTML and JATS XML (the gold standard of research articles) is an onerous process, often times manually performed "offshore". On Authorea we seek to marry the ease of writing on Word or Google Docs with the power of LaTeX, HTML, and Git.  By doing that we seek to combine the writing and publishing process so that writing is publishing. We believe that this paradigm can not only make communicating research quicker but can also make it drastically cheaper for authors and publishers.The power of LaTeX 💪LaTeX is a powerful markup language used primarily by those in the hard sciences--physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians etc. It is immensely powerful for controlling the presentation of documents, however it comes with a steep learning curve. Want to bold text? In LaTeX you need to write \textbf{bold}. Want to italicize text? Write \textit{italicize}.  In the eyes of some researchers that extra control and access to the underlying layer of markup is a benefit allowing the precise control of typesetting at a professional level.  On the converse, many, if not most, might see this as as being too cumbersome for editing and thus will never use it. At Authorea, we believe that there are strengths and weaknesses of LaTeX. We seek to provide a broad spectrum of LaTeX support so that whether you are Donald Knuth himself or someone who thinks LaTeX is a rubber, you can take advantage of Authorea and the power of LaTeX.  Below, we highlight how we are re-positioning and repurposing LaTeX in a way that is accessible to \textit{all researchers}. 🙃 Labeling and referencing figures and headingsLabeling figures and tables is something that is commonly done when writing a research article but how you do this depends upon how you write research articles. If you're writing in Word or Google Docs, you may refer to a figure or table like this:As seen in Figure 1.If you're writing in LaTeX, you will likely refer to a figure in a different way, like this:As seen in Figure \ref{527885}.While this is not a revolutionary change, it makes editing easier if you're working with multiple figures and you need to change the organization of the document around.  On Authorea, labeling and numbering is updated automatically whenever you add, remove, or move a figure or heading. Insert a new figure or move a figure around and they are automatically re-labelled.  This feature is expected in LaTeX (and commonly used) but is difficult to achieve and consequently use in Word.  We've made it easy for researchers that typically write in Word, as well as LaTeX writers, to label and reference any part of a document.More on labels and references here 👈Powerful document exportingResearchers who write in LaTeX not only write differently than most researchers, they also tend to publish and share their work differently.  Indeed, Figure \ref{527885} highlights the differences in pre-printing (self-publishing) between fields where LaTeX is the norm (arXiv) and where LaTeX is largely unheard of (Life sciences). Although there are many issues and reasons for the differences in preprint growth between disciplines, it can't be ignored that LaTeX helps facilitate preprints by allowing researchers to produce professionally typeset documents on their own.

Retraction Watch is a blog that tracks retractions in science -- and it's probably a site you never want your research to be on. To many, retracting your work means that you've committed fraud, and in most cases can be the end of a researcher's career. However, that's not always the case: in fact, retracting your work for the right reasons can even be good for your career and good for science (Lu 2013). Retraction Watch highlights cases where scientists did not retract their work due to fraud, but rather because it was "the right thing."  Here we take the opportunity to further highlight these pieces and the courageous scientists that did the right thing despite an enormous stigma.We believe the future of scholarly communication will be more dynamic than it is today. By definition, this will require more corrections and retractions.  Authorea was built to show the full history of a document, from creation to final publication. We allow annotations of the literature and believe that a more dynamic and robust form of communication is the future -- it's what we're building. Join us!

At the foundation of research is data.  The papers we write and the figures we make revolve around it and it is what we spend countless hours collecting. And yet, most raw data remains absent from major studies \cite{Alsheikh_Ali_2011}.  This is a problem that has received much attention the past few weeks,  with preliminary findings being released from the Cancer Reproducibility Project, a large multi-year effort to see how robust top cancer studies are \cite{2017}.  Like previous studies in psychology \cite{2015} and cancer \cite{Begley_2012}, the findings from the reproducibility project, that a large percentage of findings are irreproducible or at least very difficult to reproduce raise serious questions and doubts about how we conduct and communicate our research.Authorea was founded to reinvent the research article so that it is data-rich, interactive, transparent, and replicable.  Not only did we want to make Authorea a place where researchers could collaborate easier and communicate their results more quickly, we also wanted to make sure that the data behind the study could be easily shared.  This is why each article on Authorea is a repository in itself that allows you to host data directly within your article.  We enabled integrations with Jupyter notebooks and various data visualization tools not just to make the document more aesthetically pleasing, but to make it easier to analyze each other's work.  A quote in The Atlantic summarized one problem we're working to fix quite well:"If people had deposited raw data and full protocols at the time of publication, we wouldn’t have to go back to the original authors," says Iorns. That would make it much easier for scientists to truly check each other’s work.- The AtlanticWe believe that static snapshots of research living in PDFs behind paywalls are inimical to the advancement of research and the findings from the various efforts looking at reproducibility in research support this.  Authorea is first and foremost a modern collaborative editor--we want to make it easy to write your work and utilize the power of the web-- but we're much more than this, with preprint capabilities (DOIs coming soon), direct submissions to journals, and data hosting, we are working to make research communication more robust on numerous levels. Why should the most important documents in the world be shared and disseminated so poorly? They don't have to be and in fact, we're seeing encouraging signs that the next generation of researchers will do it differently.The following are just a few student papers all utilizing open data sets and analyses on Authorea.Analysis of ground-level ozone formation and its correlation with concentration of other pollutants and weather elementsVision Zero Crash Data AnalysisWe hope you'll join us and write your next paper with us.  How we make research more robust as a community starts with us as individuals.  

Authorea aims to make research writing and dissemination more effective and modern for all of research. That means academic research as well as tech, biotech, pharma, real estate, and financial research, to mention a few. One question we receive almost across all groups when discussing how Authorea might be able to help researchers is: "Can we customize the appearance of articles and profile pages to use on our own site?" Our answer: "Yes, soon." Today, we're happy to introduce the ability for groups, labs, teams, private companies, and large organizations to customize the appearance of their organization page as well as their documents (see Fig \ref{303825}). This group-based feature is currently available only to licensed groups (see pricing page).

The importance of citations in scholarshipCitations are arguably one of the defining features of research communication. Linking the corpus of knowledge together, across time and space, they connect Einstein's work at the beginning of last century \cite{Einstein_1906} to researchers writing important physics research today \cite{Stanislavsky_2017}. This web of knowledge is immensely powerful for the analysis of ideas over time and for determining what might be important or not. If you imagine the scholarly corpus as a brain you can think of scholarly citations as its neural connections.

Writing a thesis is a laborious process that takes months. Thesis writing marks the culmination of years of work for many students and is a process that can be both exciting and terrifying. Whether you are an undergraduate, a masters, or a doctoral student, writing your thesis or dissertation means work, and lots of it. Get ready and try to make the most out of the experience. While arduous, it can also be gratifying.How long is a thesis?The average length of a thesis varies depending upon discipline and the degree you are pursuing. However, most doctoral theses and dissertations are dozens, if not hundreds, of pages long (see Fig \ref{382478}). On average, the longest theses are found in history and anthropology (300 pages long) whereas the shortest ones are in mathematics and biostatistics (100 pages or less). 

Authorea is on a mission to build the best research document editor and publishing platform ever made. We believe that the best way to accelerate scientific discovery is to give full control of document creation and distribution to the researcher, and that the best way to do that is to build a web-based editor that enables researchers to collaborate and disseminate their work seamlessly.Authorea,  like many research projects, started with a question: Why is the research writing process so slow? We started with the rough notion that the internet age was failing to deliver optimal tools for things like collaborative writing and submitting works to publishers.  We refined this core idea and launched Authorea two years ago.Since then, we've devoted tens of thousands of hours to understand how to build software that makes it easier for researchers to do groundbreaking work. At the beginning of this year, we started building our new editor -- Authorea Beta -- the editor that will bring Authorea to the mainstream to benefit researchers in every discipline.Today, we're happy to share with you Authorea Beta. Writing research online has tremendous potential for collaboration, dissemination, and discovery. We're here to bring writing online to researchers and we'll be with you every step. 

A concise and factual abstract is required. The abstract should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results and major conclusions. An abstract is often presented separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. For this reason, References should be avoided, but if essential, then cite the author(s) and year(s). Also, non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should be avoided, but if essential they must be defined at their first mention in the abstract itself.KeywordsImmediately after the abstract, provide a maximum of 6 keywords, using American spelling and avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts (avoid, for example, 'and', 'of'). Be sparing with abbreviations: only abbreviations firmly established in the field may be eligible. These keywords will be used for indexing purposes.

BROOKLYN, NY, May 22, 2017 -- Authorea, the online home for researchers to write and disseminate documents, has partnered with Society for Neuroscience (SfN), the world's leading neuroscience organization. With the partnership researchers interested in submitting to SfN may use Authorea to submit manuscripts directly to eNeuro and The Journal of Neuroscience with one click. The integration greatly reduces formatting and data entry overhead for Authorea users by ensuring documents conform to SfN submission requirements automatically.With the recent launch of its flagship document editor, Authorea has become the go-to place for researchers to write scholarly articles. Researchers have the freedom to write in multiple markup languages, store data alongside in-progress documents, establish collaborative workflows, insert and format citations, and much more. Submitting directly to the world's leading publishers allows any researcher writing on Authorea to have many options for publication.Josh Nicholson, Chief Research Officer at Authorea, says: “We're happy to be working with Society for Neuroscience to make collaboration and publication easier for neuroscientists. We're excited to work with such an important and engaged community.”Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest and most prestigious neuroscience organization with over 40,000 international physicians and scientists. Founded in 1969 it publishes some of the world's leading research in the field of neuroscience.Templates for submission to SfN can be found beloweNeuroeNeuro title pageThe Journal of NeurosciencePress ContactAdyam Ghebre, Outreach, Authorea+1 (646) 598-9285About AuthoreaAuthorea is an online document editor for research and the place where scientific collaboration happens. Authorea is trusted worldwide by leading researchers writing and publishing content in every discipline, from astrophysics to zoology. The online document editor supports a wide range of markup languages and scientific integrations, including the most popular citation management, graphing, and visualization plugins. Authorea is on a mission to accelerate science through a superior web-based research-writing platform that delivers powerful tools and capabilities to researchers.

General Article Organization and Text SpecificationsCell full-length articles generally contain the following sections in this order: Title Authors Affiliations Contact Information Additional Title Page Footnotes Summary Introduction Results Discussion Author Contributions Acknowledgments References Figure and Table Legends STAR Methods Figures and Tables Graphical Abstract and Supplemental Information. The text (title through legends) should be provided as one document which may also contain the tables. Figures should be provided separately. Supplemental Information should be provided separately.The total character count of the main text should not exceed 55000 characters. This limit includes all text (and the spaces between words) in the title author list affiliations Summary Introduction Results Discussion Author Contributions Acknowledgments References and main figure legends but excludes STAR Methods text and supplemental item legends.An article may contain up to seven figures and/or tables. Gene symbols should be italicized; protein products of the loci are not italicized. Nonstandard abbreviations should be defined when first used in the text. Use of abbreviations should be kept at a minimum. Manuscript file types that we can accept for submission include Word RTF and TXT. Required items differ for each article type and are specified during the submission process.Please note that the text should be double spaced and pages should be numbered. Although summaries need to be entered as text files separate from the body of the manuscript during the online submission process they should also be included within the manuscript file as usual.Manuscripts that do not conform to the format guidelines may be returned to the authors for reformatting.

Publishing needs to keep up with research writingModern research is written collaboratively, online, and with more accompanying data and media than ever before. The number of collaborators is going up \cite{Adams_2012} and in many cases the time to publish is going up as well \cite{Powell_2016} -- it's truly a time of great change in the research world. At the same time, researchers have more publication options than ever before \cite{Larsen_2010}. The proliferation of publication options means that researchers have endless options for their work. How do researchers choose the best venue for their work? What happens when the first venue declines to publish a piece -- how do the authors find an alternative? How can publishers evolve to these changing demands? Most of the time submission is grueling for authorsAs most seasoned authors know, the submission process is neither easy nor enjoyable. Often there is a long road ahead of submit-reject-reformat-submit-revise-resubmit-proof. It's not fun. One of the most vexing issue for authors is the intense amount of formatting that goes into conforming to a particular journal style. Submission requirements are vastly different from publication to publication and the result is that authors must spend enormous amounts of time preparing manuscripts.Enter AuthoreaAuthorea is an online document editor that is collaborative and format-neutral. Authorea helps researchers write a manuscript in a vanilla style and then output to thousands of styles (see fig \ref{391184}). Authorea users, which number close to 100,000 and are growing daily, may also submit directly to hundreds of journals. 

Today, we're happy to announce the release of a new and improved version control for Authorea documents: History view. What is version control?A version control or revision control system automatically records changes to a piece of text over time. As a result, a document will contain underneath it the story of how it came together -- who made which contributions and when -- with the ability to track changes on a granular level over time. The Authorea system is based on Git, the most popular version control system in the world and one originally developed by the creator of the Linux operating system. 

How researchers communicate with one another and the world has changed very little over the last 350 years. Attempts to improve the process have been implemented throughout the years, not all of which have been to the benefit of research. Here we highlight some policies implemented by various publishers that we believe are antithetical to research communication and what we're doing to try to fix them.