The Frustrations That Made Me Build a Better Academic Writing Tool

I've only written one scientific publication. It was a review article. And what frustrated me the most was all the copying and pasting I had to do.

I love science. I love the scientific method. I love publishing. But the process of writing that one article was such a painful experience that I told myself: I will first create the application I want, and then I will publish again.

Frustration #1: The Endless Copy-Paste for Screening

We had to screen a lot of articles. So what did I do? I copied and pasted all the titles into a document. Then I went through them one by one to decide: accept or reject.

But it's not like I had buttons for this. I had to strike them through, or delete them, or use some kind of formatting to mark my decision. Then for the articles I accepted, I did the same thing with abstracts. Copy from PubMed. Paste into the document. Over and over.

This manual labor was so tiring and annoying. And not only that - it could easily lead to mistakes. Maybe I missed some lines somewhere. Often there were points where I was unsure if I had already done something or not. Did I use the right formatting? Did I mark this one correctly? Every step felt uncertain.

It felt to me like I should have buttons for this instead of having to do it all myself.

Frustration #2: Not Recording Search Results

At some point I was told I should have recorded the number of results for each search. I didn't know I had to do this. I just copied all the articles as I was instructed.

And then I realized - this could have been done automatically with the PubMed API. The search, the result counts, all of it. But instead, there I was, doing everything manually.

Frustration #3: Tracking Excerpts and Citations

When we were reviewing the full text, there were many passages we wanted to include in our article. Important information we needed to paraphrase and cite.

So I copied and pasted these phrases into our draft. But here's the problem: I always had to keep track of which article each piece of text came from. And if I changed the order, or moved things around, I had to update the citations manually. Every. Single. Time.

This was so difficult. So frustrating. So time-consuming. And probably inaccurate. We did it correctly, but I always had to double-check. If I missed something, I had to go back and find exactly which article the text came from.

I knew that programmatically, this would be very easy. You just link the text to its original source once, and it stays linked no matter where you move it. But no tool did this.

Frustration #4: Zotero in Google Docs

We used Google Docs with Zotero. And as much as I love Zotero, it is very buggy and slow in Google Docs.

Sometimes it just unlinks all your citations. For no reason at all. You don't know when it's going to happen. You have to constantly make backups of your document, just in case it breaks.

A friend of mine was writing an article, and one day before publication, all the citations got unlinked. They had to stay up all night to relink them. That was a really bad experience for them. I'm glad I didn't have this exact experience, but I knew the danger. I lived with that fear.

Every time I added citations in Zotero, it would lag. Sometimes it just stopped working and I had to refresh and do it all over again. You actually fear a little bit that things will break. And you've already spent so much time on it.

You shouldn't have to fear your tools.

I'm a Physician. I Don't Have Time for This.

I'm a physician. Back then I was a medical student, and it was so hard because I had so much to study. I don't have time like maybe an academic researcher who doesn't have to deal with patients, who doesn't have to learn new information for their own specialty.

Every pain point was a frustrating experience. It's not like one of them was the biggest problem - every step had its own painful experience.

This was a breaking point for me. I told myself: I will first create the application I want, and then I will publish again. It was a big no-no to have the same pain again.

So I Fixed All of It

All these problems I had? I fixed them.

• Screening with buttons - accept or reject with one click. No more strikethrough formatting.
• Automatic search tracking - search PubMed directly, and the result counts are recorded automatically.
• Excerpts linked to sources - save a passage, and it stays connected to its citation forever. Move it around, the citation follows.
• Citations that don't break - built-in, not a plugin. No more random unlinking.

I called it LitRevs because it started with a literature review. But it's really for anyone who wants to write academic papers without fighting their tools.

If This Sounds Familiar

I built this for myself. But if you've ever spent hours copy-pasting from PubMed, lived in fear of Zotero crashing, or lost track of which excerpt came from which paper - this is for you too.