## 2 The Particularities of Scientific Writing
### Results of a Survey on Scientific Writing  
In order to gain a deeper understanding of how scientific writing is accomplished, which tools are being used and how authors rate the strengths and weaknesses of the tools they are using, we carried out a survey (N = 1,603) amongst students and researchers from the University of Paderborn in September 2009. The survey focused on six main parts: (1) document type and software used,(2) general software features, (3) revision of documents, (4) backup of documents, (5) restrictions in writing (e.g., through templates), and (6) features that were liked or disliked in the software used. As for general results, Microsoft Word was used by 67.1% (902 people), LaTeX by 18.3% (246 people), Open Office was used by 11.1% (149 people) and other tools were used by 3.6% (48 people, N = 1,345). Out of these participants, 39.5% (468 people) answered the survey after having written a thesis and 54,5% (646 people) related the survey to having written a homework assignment. The remainder had written a scientific paper (4.3%/51 people), a dissertation (1.8%/21 people) or other scientific documents (71 people, N = 1,258). In the following we only present the specific results for Microsoft Word and LaTeX, reflecting their high percentages of use. For neither of them we regard different versions of the software. Most of the questions participants were presented a six-point Likert scale ranging from 1 to 6. Regarding general software features, we found out that participants felt well supported by either tool. Specific averages for the questions range from 4.73 for _PDF export_ to 4.53 for the _creation of a table of contents, formatting and page numbers_. They result to 4.31 for the _initial software setup_ down to the lowest average of 4.19 for _citing and referencing_. In direct comparison, Microsoft Word outperformed LaTeX for the _easier setup_ but lost on all other parts of this section. The participants found LaTeX to be 23% easier to use for citations and referencing, 31% better for the _creation of the table of contents, page numbers and general formatting_ and 25% better for the _creation of a printable document_. The question towards how well the software supported the user in revising the document consisted of four parts. _Sharing the document_ was the best supported feature (average: 5.0) and _revising the document_ on one's own ranged second with 4.64. _Achieving a desired layout_ and _merging changes from others_ averaged at 4.28 and 4.20 respectively. The direct comparison between Word and LaTeX shows a marginal 0.02 and 0.14 point lead for Word on merging other's work and revising. As for the document layout, LaTeX achieves 19% (0.94 points) better results on average and gains 5% (0.21 points) on _sharing the document_. Block four of the survey was dedicated to finding out how participants performed their document backups. The survey shows that more than half of the participants did manual backups on USB/DVD (856 people) and another 29.8% (352 people) used hard drive backup tools to back up their work. Online backup and version control resulted to less than 10% in each case (N = 1,181, multiple answers were allowed). As for the frequency of backups, 82.2% (705 people) performed backups rather often or very often. 89.8% (1,018 people) had an internet connection _often or always_. Only 1.2% had no or only little access to the Internet (N = 1,134). Finally, we asked participants which features they liked about the software they were using (677 statements) and which ones they did not like or missed (613 statements). However, we did not pose these questions to find out about the strengths and weaknesses of specific software, but rather to explore which features of a writing software are essential to the participants. The statements were very subjective, contained more than one piece of information and so we clustered them in categories according to their message.