Write Scientific Paper in MS Word

Recently, I have to write some paper in MS Word which I haven’t used for some years and never used for scientific paper writing. Coming from the LaTex community, the two major challenge I have are

  1. Equation writing/numbering
  2. Citation/reference generation

Here is the results of my recent experience.

Equation Editing

Although you can never compare equation editing in Word with the wonderful experience in LaTex, Word started to offer some basic tools to help you out. There are limited built-in symbols and operators to choose from, but they are sufficient to write a paper light in equations. Although, the efficiency of creating those equations in Word is still no well close to LaTex.

Equation Numbering

This youtube video gives a thorough tutorial on how to do equation numbering in Word. However, in Word 2016, you can add a number after equation by simply #(1) + ENTER as pointed out by some comments under the video. Cross-reference of equation number was also covered by that video. You can add chapter/sectcion number to equation as well.

Citation/reference

EndNote is truly the king of referencing for MS word. You can check out what it works in my reference library repo README. If EndNote is not available for you, [Google Scholar] may be a free alternative though you have to manually change the style according to your journals requirements.

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