Tools for Academic Writing in 2023

When writing a scientific paper, I use several tools below to boost and speed up my writing process. Hence, I only need two weeks to a month to complete the first version of my manuscript (after the experiment has been conducted). Two tools are paid: Copilot and Grammarly. Before going down to the list below, you may also be interested in my resources for academic writing - word concordance [1]. For last year's tool (2022), specializing on both research and paper writing instead of paper writing only, you can check it here [2].

1. Mendeley (the old desktop version, not the new reference manager, to create a BIB file automatically)
2. Grammarly (vscode plugin)
3. Latex Workshop (vscode plugin)
4. Copilot (vscode plugin)
5. ChatGPT (to ask questions)

By using these tools, I DON'T need to:

• Create bibliography manually
• Sometimes, write all sentences in paragraphs since Copilot will do it.
• Check the grammar manually.
• Create Table, Figure, and Equation manually in Latex (thanks to Latex Workshop).

Other tools (unexplored well, in progress for adaptation)

1. https://www.explainpaper.com (tool to explain any hard-to-understand terms/sentences in a paper)
2. https://elicit.org/ (like ChatGPT, but with reference)
3. LTeX – LanguageTool grammar/spell checking (alternative to Grammarly, free)

Reference

[1] http://bagustris.blogspot.com/2020/07/resources-for-academic-writing-word.html

[2] https://bagustris.blogspot.com/2023/01/tools-i-used-for-accelerating-science.html

Configure java-11 for Ltex in VScode Ubuntu 16.04

As a scientist or researcher or a lecturer, writing paper in Latex is a must. To make it easy writing in Latex, I used VScode with Latex Workshop extension. For non native English speaker, there is another extension called ltex (based on "language tool") to check spelling and grammar. This is a perfect combination for writing paper in Latex: VScode+Latex Workshop+Ltex.

However, since I used Ubuntu 16.04 as my OS, there is a difficulty on installing the latest Ltex version (v9.0.0) in Ubuntu 16.04, which required java-11. Here, I documented my steps to tackle the problem.

1. Download openjdk from this link: https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk11-binaries/releases/download/jdk-11.0.10%2B9/OpenJDK11U-jdk_x64_linux_hotspot_11.0.10_9.tar.gz
2. Extract the downloaded file.
3. Copy extracted file to /usr/local:  sudo cp -r jdk-11.0.10+9/ /usr/local
4. Set ltex java path to: /usr/local/jdk-11.0.10+9
5. Finish

The last step, step 4 (before finish), can be shown below.

Now Ltex is ready, as shown below. It checks your spelling and grammar errors aumatically, for free.

Another trick

I used another PC with also 16.04 version, but I don't need to follow these tricky steps with leaving "Ltex Java path" blank.