I find it very easy to write with mathematica. There are a lot of templates to choose from, and the formula visualization is cool. Also it's very convenient to manage chapters and sections. With EndNote, citation is not a problem. So isn't it a good idea to write academic papers in mathematics?
Is it A Good Idea To Write Papers With Mathematica?
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3That depends on whether the publication you wish to submit your journal to would accept *Mathematica* notebooks... the custom is a $\TeX$ file, I'm told... – 2012-02-18
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2The disadvantage of any WYSIWYG editor is that you can't treat a document as source code. Being able to do this, as you can with latex, is very advantageous. – 2012-02-18
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0Yes, it is very good for Wolfram. There are also some nifty workbooks in Sage (http://sagenb.org/pub/). $\TeX$ and $\LaTeX$ are "good ideas" and standards for math authoring. – 2012-02-18
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0For publishing: no. Publishers are bound to the formats accepted by typesetting systems and printers, which is postscript or PDF generated from LaTeX or TeX. – 2012-02-18
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6In general, it is a bad idea to hitch your wagon to any proprietary computer programming language. Do you really want to have to be forced to pay for updates of Mathematica for the rest of your life just so that you can open the files of your old publications? – 2012-02-19
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0@Ben: I agree that vendor lock-in is a problem, but it isn't so much of a problem now that there is the free CDF player, which can read notebook files. – 2012-02-19
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0@3Sphere: Notebooks are plain text files, so can be treated like source code. Turn off `FileOutlineCache` and `TrackCellChangeTimes` and it then [plays with version control quite nicely](http://stackoverflow.com/q/2816628/421225). – 2012-02-19
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0@Simon When I imply that Mathematica files can't be treated like source code, I'm not referring to the format of the file, I'm talking about the programmatic constructs that can be used. In Latex, for example, I can easily define a macro that encapsulates the formatting of given construct; I can assemble a larger document from many smaller ones via input/include. I can change any little detail I wish by simply "programming" the document correctly. Can you do all of these things with Mathematica documents? – 2012-02-19
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0@3Sphere: [Cascading stylesheets](http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Stylesheets.html) gives you the formatting and would also take care of formatting macros. Other TeX-like macros are possible, but not so straightforward. Assembling large documents from smaller is definitely possible, [manipulating and creating notebooks using the kernel](http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/LowLevelNotebookProgramming.html) is quite easy. If I was writing a long thesis or a book in Mma I would probably take this route (and I'm sure others have). – 2012-02-20
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0... Although I've used Mathematica for large, formatted personal notes and research documentation, I don't think I would use it for publishing a document that is meant to be printed. The way you want to read things on a electronic device is not the same way you want things to be printed. Mathematica still is not ideal at the latter. Though a CDF-style interactive document might be the way things go if we are ever to transition into the long touted paperless office. – 2012-02-20
4 Answers
In my experience, journals only accept $\TeX$ (or $\LaTeX$) for publication.
It appears that Mathematica is able to export its notebooks as $\TeX$. You may need to do a fair amount of tweaking to the output to make it acceptable to the journal, though. They will typically have their own style file which must be used, and often other requirements which Mathematica's output may or may not satisfy.
There are a few books written in Mathematica and dealing with mathematical research (to some extent), they are really interesting, e.g. :
- "Mathematica in Action" by Stan Wagon (a mathematician)
"Mathematica GuideBooks" by Michael Trott (a physicist)
their authors are not newbies but expert Mathematica programmers with many years of experience.
Most research journals require $\TeX$, and one can export Mathematica notebooks to $\TeX$, but they'll still need some work to refine and bring them to a required format. On the other hand one can publish in The Mathematica Journal using a specific template, although it doesn't have to be always the best choice.
There is no general definitve answer to this question, since it depends on many factors and skills in programming. I don't think so it is very convenient to manage chapters and sections, e.g. changing stylesheets, screen environments etc. is not in general reversable, at least as one would like it. It is much easier to write good-looking articles in $\TeX$. Perhaps in future it will be much easier to publish research papers with Mathematica, though it is already a great programming environment and really rewarding even nowadays.
I have written the majority of my papers in LATEX. I use Mathematica to create many diagrams, graphs, dynamic models etc. Mathematica, however, imports LATEX. So if it allows you to organize the paper in an easier fashion, I don't see why not. Journals, take note, might have their own required formats though, so make certain Mathematica can meet those requirements.
If the papers have a computational part, like some mathematical science
and most data science
papers do these days, then please consider reproducibility as a requirement for tool selection.
See "Reproducible Research in the Mathematical Sciences" https://web.stanford.edu/~vcs/papers/PCAM_20140620-VCS.pdf.
"Traditionally, mathematical research was conducted via mental abstraction and manual symbolic manipulation"
"Times have been changing: on the one hand, Mathematics has grown into the so-called Mathematical Sciences, and in this larger endeavor, proposing new computational methods takes center stage, and documenting the behavior of proposed methods in test cases became an important part of research activity".
If reproducibility is a requirement then Mathematica
or SymPy
are worth it because nice typesetting alone do not compensate for the ability to actually comprehend and reuse the work that went into the paper.