Thanks to computers, creating scientific documents has in the last few years become a much simpler task. Hand-drawn chemical structures, pasted into spaces left in final drafts, have gone the way of the alembic. Several software suppliers offer scientific word processors with varying degrees of capability. The best of these let scientists create presentation-quality documents on their personal computers, complete with all graphic elements such as structures, charts and spectra. The time that researchers need to spend putting together a paper, report or presentation has decreased significantly, and the visual quality of the result has, in general, increased.

As beneficial as these programs are to scientists, room remains for improvement, both from the viewpoint of the individual scientist and from that of the entire organization. With recent advances in computer hardware and software technology and recent offerings by software vendors, needed improvements are not only possible but here today. Complete scientific wordprocessing packages are being replaced by individual specialized programs, often from different vendors, that work in concert to provide all of the capabilities of a packaged scientific word processor, plus substantial enhancements for broader scientific computing applications. Both individual scientists and research organizations as a whole can benefit from the new technology through greatly increased productivity.

Benefits to Each Scientist

Let us look first at how new systems can benefit the individual scientist? Information gathering is necessarily one of the most important steps in document creation. Yet information gathering has historically been divorced from the document-creation process, partly out of necessity due to technological restraints.

Using traditional technology, if a project leader wants to quickly put together a monthly report, all of the information needed from other software programs must be gathered for the report before entering a scientific wordprocessing program. The report can then be started and graphic elements created, such as chemical reaction schemes. If, midway through the report, the researcher realizes additional information is needed that resides in another computer program, say a corporate database, the document must be closed (after saving it, of course), the program exited, another program started to access the corporate database, write down or remember the needed information, exit that program, and, finally, add the missing information. Later the researcher may realize, with frustration, that additional information is needed from yet another software program. This all-too-common scenario is no longer necessary with programs available today that run in windowed computing environments.