Academia and chromebooks Part 2: Collaborative writing with google Docs and Paperpile

Thank you for the response to the previous post about using Google Sheets to organise a lab group. I really didn't expect to have such a high readership or engagement on the first post! That has given me motivation to carry on the series. Today's topic is Google Docs and Paperpile for collaborative writing.

Google docs for collaborative writing

There are many reasons as to why I've made the switch to Google docs for my academic writing (including the basic "I have a chromebook and it doesn't run Microsoft Word").  The main reason being that most academic writing is collaborative and therefore Google Docs is a great solution to the revision tracking and management problem.

If you work as a researcher in a University you will be aware of the high number of collaborative documents that have to be written.  I have grown very tired of the rigmarole of sending Word documents between the writers, all using different referencing packages, different styles for naming the file after revisions, and of course, different proficiencies at editing the most up to date version of the document. If there is an easy content management system, such as github, for Word documents, I've yet to see it. Google docs allows a single document to be edited by all writers at any one moment, with changes easily visible and revisions tracked.

Figure 1: Adding comments to student reports without writing it for them.

When I have a student who has to write a report, I have them start a new Google Docs document and immediately share it with my email address. That way I can keep an eye on their progress as they write it, without having to wait for them to send the first of many Word files in the early hours of the morning, which get hidden amongst all the other spam that arrives through the night. This might sound a bit 'Big Brother', however, in this case I have found that students work more on their reports if they are aware that I am keeping an eye on it.

I have to be careful to avoid writing reports for my students, and therefore, when I have a shared document with the student, I have the sharing properties set to "Can view and comment" only. With comments, I can give the student immediate feedback on their writing (shown in figure 1), and they have the option to respond, accept or (if they are bolshie), decline.

Paperpile: A reference manager for Google chrome and Docs

For a word processor to be useful for academic writing, there needs to be an easy way to incorporate a bibliography for citing other work. Over the years I have tried many different programs, from Endnote to Mendeley via Zotero, with the Mendeley being my favourite for OpenOffice work. Unfortunately, Mendeley doesn't have a Google Docs extension and therefore I had to find another option.

Figure 2: Adding a web reference to Paperpile with the Google chrome extension.

That's when I found Paperpile. This is an on-line reference manager that operates in much the same way as Mendeley. There are three parts to paperpile, the website and the extension (shown in Figure 2) in Google chrome (it is currently only available for chrome), and the Google Doc add-on. 

The Paperpile website acts as the reference manager portion of Paperpile. You sign in with your Google account, tell it where you want to store PDFs on your drive and away you go. You can manually enter information about papers, but the real power comes from the extension.  When you come across a paper that you would like to have in your reference library, you simply press the button on your tool-bar and the document is ripped of its metadata, entered into your Paperpile library and, if available, the PDF file stored to a folder in your Google drive. 

Over the years I have amassed a large reference library (and corresponding pdf folder). Paperpile had no issues when importing this in to its own library, it even has the ability to import from Mendeley while retaining any sub-folders and organisation you had.

Figure 3: Citing a document with paperpile

It is easy to cite documents using paperpile through the Google Doc add-on (shown in Figure 3), and the references are automatically listed at the end of the document (with all the standard Harvard, Chicago, etc formats that you'd expect).  The paperpile add-on also allows you to search for papers online which you don't have in your library and cite them (behind the scenes, paperpile adds the ones you use to your library).

Another great thing about paperpile is its Shared Folders. I can create a folder for each research project in my lab to act as a repository for the researchers working in that field, then they have immediate access. This is much easier than sending them email, after email, of PDFs to read, and allows them to cite the papers immediately in their documents.

I have been very impressed with Paperpile and have purchased enough licenses for my lab-group members to use it in their work. Student's have a habit of neglecting their referencing when writing reports, but through the use of google-docs and Paperpile, I have managed to improve their grades in this area. 

Imperfections: Areas that need improving

Despite giving a glowing, google-fan-boy, review of Google Docs here and to my colleagues, there are a number of imperfections and improvements that I would like to see. Firstly, and this is a really strange omission on Google Doc's part is the absence of captions for figures inside a google Document. While writing this post in Google Blogger, I can add an image and then give it a caption which is formatted and appears under the image. This doesn't, for some reason, exist in google Docs despite the common interface.

Another omission is the ability to number headings and produce a proper table of contents. Currently, I am using a third party add-on to number my headings and subheadings, which works OK except that the table of contents doesn't show the corresponding page numbers. If anyone knows of a third party add-on that does this, please let me know. 

Finally, the only criticism I have of Paperpile is the lack of an offline mode. I have seen this addressed by Paperpile, and that it is due to the design of the back-end of the database. If an offline mode was available (alongside OpenOffice and Word plugins), I could definitely see Paperpile overtaking Mendeley as the reference manager of choice. 

Next article

Thanks for reading, I'm sorry that it turned out to be quite a long post. Perhaps I should have split this in to one post for google docs, and one for paperpile. The next post will be about preparing lectures with google Slides.