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Science Hack

Science Hack

Tips that are making the daily life of a scientist easier.

Metadata in Microsoft Word documents

Metadata in Microsoft Word documents

Metadata such as author, title, journal or persistent identifier are essential for scholarly documents, and some of us are spending a significant part of our time adding or fixing metadata. Unfortunately we sometimes don’t pay enough attention to the flow of metadata, i.e. we ignore already existing metadata,

Using Microsoft Word with git

Using Microsoft Word with git

One of the major challenges of writing a journal article is to keep track of versions - both the different versions you create as the document progresses, and to merge in the changes made by your collaborators. For most academics Microsoft Word is the default writing tool, and it is

Automatically list all your publications in your blog

A common feature of blogs written by scientists is a listing of all their publications. Publication lists are a great way to provide background information about your research. Publication lists should provide links to the fulltext versions of these publications, should be nicely formatted - e.g. using a common

Wikis, Q&As and Cookbooks

Wikis, Q&As and Cookbooks

Last week I attended the Transforming Scholarly Communication workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The main goal of the workshop was to come up with practical recommendations for the topics #resources #review #literature #media #recognition and #platforms: This workshop strives to be different in one important way—rather than focusing on utopian

How to formally cite a blog post

How to formally cite a blog post

Other blog posts often provide important background material for your own posts, and they are typically cited by inline links in the text. But sometimes we need more formal citations, e.g. when citing blog posts in a journal article or when providing a bibliography. But how do you properly

How to use Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) in your blog posts

How to use Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) in your blog posts

One of the annoyances with bibliographies as we use them for scholarly papers is that is usually unclear why a particular paper was cited. It is often possible for readers to gather this information by looking at the citation in the context of the surrounding text, but this is very

OPDS: RSS for ePub or how to distribute ePub files

OPDS: RSS for ePub or how to distribute ePub files

ePub is a great format for scholarly content, and there are a number of tools to create ePub files. But creating content is only half the story, at least as important is an easy mechanism for distribution. This is particularly true if your ePub files are not books, but shorter