November-December 2020 Newsletter

Video spotlight: The 20-year evolution of Inera & eXtyles

We couldn’t bid farewell to 2020 without rounding off our #eXtyles20th celebration! It wasn’t easy, but we packed 20 years of eXtyles history into just 2 minutes for this video whirlwind tour.

From the Support team: Get your patch!

On October 27, Microsoft released an Office update, version 2010 build 13328.20292, which has been causing trouble for eXtyles users ever since by causing styles to be misapplied or dropped after running eXtyles Advanced Processes.

We’ve notified Microsoft of the problem and are working with them on a fix for it. Meanwhile, we’ve created a patch solution to work around it!

Get all the details and download the patch on our FAQ page!

Wrapping up #XUG2020

Thanks to everyone who participated in making our 16th annual eXtyles User Group meeting a big success!

Read all about the meeting in our annual XUG wrap-up blog post or check out individual slide presentations.

If you registered for XUG, check your inbox for an email with links to closed-captioned on-demand video of every session from the meeting! If you didn’t attend XUG, it’s not too late—you can register now for access to the video content.

Interactive visualizations from Atypon & Wiley

Over at Atypon, our colleagues have been hard at work on something pretty cool: technology for creating interactive figures in online publications!

You can try out the results for yourself in this preprint article on Atypon’s Authorea platform, as well as in Wiley’s International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, which recently piloted the solution and published “the first set of computational research articles featuring interactive visualizations and integrated source data and code.”

On the Inera blog

Our favorite Word Tips

Everyone loves a good Word Tip! In this post, we share some favorite past Word Tips chosen by Inera staff.

Back to the beginning: An interview with Irina Golfman

As part of our #eXtyles20th series, we sat down with Inera’s recently retired founder and president to talk about where Inera started, how things have changed, and what advice she would give her 1992 self.

What we’re reading

Retraction detection

Nobody wants to unwittingly cite a retracted article, but accidents happen—not least because retractions aren’t always easy to find. Which journals contain the most citations to retracted articles? This blog post by Scite.ai documents their efforts to answer this question, listing the top 100 by number of citations as detected by their Reference Check tool. (Note: the post doesn’t specify the time period covered.)

Based on sheer numbers, the unsurprising “winner” is PLOS One, with 2959 citations to retracted works, but this represents just 0.02% of almost 13 million total citations. Sorting the (easily downloadable) data set by percentage puts PLOS One way down at #52 on the list, with 29 other journals also in the 0.02% category; in the #1 spot is the topical and numerical outlier Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (128/4182, or 3.06%), followed by Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics (112/30,076, or 0.37%), and Diagnostic Pathology (164/52,362, or 0.31%).

Source: Which research journals cite the most retracted work?

Author instructions

What’s in your author instructions? Klebel et al.’s recent article in PLOS One looked at the author instructions of “171 major academic journals across disciplines” and found that a substantial proportion of these journals don’t do a good job of explaining either their policies on manuscripts already posted as preprints or the details of their peer-review process. For many researchers, this is crucial information for submission decisions—which means these journals may not even be seeing submissions that would, in fact, be a good fit.

While keeping submission instructions up to date may seem like an uninspiring and thankless task, providing clear, transparent, and accessible guidance to potential authors is a key responsibility for journal editorial offices. It also saves you time! (No, really—not all authors diligently read the author instructions, but many do.)

Source: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239518

Word Tips: A short list of shortcuts

This month we’re keeping it brief with a quick list of useful but non-obvious keyboard shortcuts in Word:

  • To open the Save As dialog, use F12; to close a file, use Ctrl-W.
  • To toggle Split view on or off, use Alt+Ctrl+S. To underline just the words, not the spaces between them, use Ctrl+Shift+W; for double underline, use Ctrl+Shift+D.
  • To start again where you left off, open your file and use Shift+F5 to move to the last point you were editing before closing it.
  • To navigate from field to field in your document, use F11 (next field) and Shift+F11 (previous field).
  • To unlink hyperlinked text or change a field to plain text, use Ctrl-6.
  • To add a new Comment balloon, use Ctrl-Alt-M; to close the comment, use Esc

Have an intractable Word problem you’d love to solve? Have a clever tip to share? Send it to us at [email protected]!

It’s almost 2021!

It’s been a long, strange year for scholarly publishing, and for the world in general. We’re grateful for the continued support of our customers and partners, and also for the opportunities we’ve had this year to contribute to the dissemination of crucial research.

We wish all of you a restful December, and we’ll see you again in the January newsletter! ⛄