SCIENTIFIC EDITING AND PROOF READING USING sciPROOF

sciPROOF is an add-on for Microsoft Office, MAC and PC versions, that streamlines the scientific proofreading process. It comes with a powerful database that verifies scientific formatting and spelling. The program is seamlessly integrated with and used within Microsoft Office so there is no need to copy and paste text or switch between different applications. Other tools for scientific writing such as reference searching and glossaries are also included. Overall, using sciPROOF has the potential to save many hours of formatting and proofreading.

SUPPORTED LANGUAGES

The sciPROOF program supports all languages that are configured during the installation of Microsoft Office. For example, if support for English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc., is installed, then sciPROOF will support all of these languages. Note that terms in the current sciPROOF database are in US English, however, terms in any language configured in Office can be added.

FEATURES

The sciPROOF program seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office and works with Microsoft Word, Outlook, Outlook Express, Power Point, Front Page, Excel, Access, Visio, Publisher, One Note and Microsoft Project . The sciPROOF databases currently contain over 250,000 scientific, medical and chemical terms from the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), including all Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary list that is used for reference searching at various levels of specificity.

Spell Checker: The sciPROOF spell checker works in conjunction with the native Microsoft Office spell checker . The native Office spell checker first evaluates terms and then "sends" unrecognised terms to sciPROOF. If sciPROOF recognizes the term, it will "instruct" Office not to mark the word as unrecognised (removes the red squiggly line). If the term is misspelled, then sciPROOF will display appropriate spelling suggestion(s). It is important to note that since the Office and sciPROOF spell checkers work together, it is not necessary to re-add custom terms to sciPROOF that have been previously added to the native spell checker.

Style Checker: In conjunction with spell checking, sciPROOF verifies text styles, including font styles, e.g. italics, bold, underline, and font effects such as sub- and superscripting and ALL CAPS. While spell checking a document, sciPROOF will scan a paragraph first for spelling and then for styles according to the style information stored in active sciPROOF databases. Unique to sciPROOF is a style function that automates standard scientific notation, such as the formatting of genus and species names, and the use of Greek letters, symbols, and acronyms such as DNA and PCR. For example, if a user types in "lactococcus lactis," the software will suggest correct capitalisation and italicisation.

Greek Symbol Checker: The sciPROOF database includes the entire Greek Alphabet. This feature was designed to ensure proper use of Greek symbols and to automate their insertion. For example, if the user typed "b-catenin" or "alpha, beta, gamma-immunoglobulin," then sciPROOF would suggest " β-catenin" and "α, β, γ -immunoglobulin" respectively.

Internet Searching: Through the sciPROOF interfaces, PubMed searches can be performed within Word documents. This is facilitated through a special sciPROOF link to the US National Library of Medicine. Search results are displayed through the user's native web browser. Google , Yahoo , All the Web , and MSN search engines are also included in the sciPROOF search interface.

Scientific Glossary: sciPROOF includes a scientific glossary of over 30,000 terms from the US National Library of Medicine. This drop-down glossary is easily accessible while proofreading with sciPROOF and can be customized by the user.

WHO WOULD BENEFIT FROM USING THIS SOFTWARE?

This software is likely to be particularly useful to students writing MSc and PhD theses in the biological sciences and to those writing scientific papers .

PRODUCT REVIEWS

An early, pre-MAC version of sciPROOF was reviewed by Aileen Constans of The Scientist. BioMed the publisher of a range of Open Source journals has recommended SciPROOF as a proofreading tool for authors.

TRY BEFORE YOU BUY

The software can be evaluated prior to purchase and potential users can quickly determine whether it meets their needs. Users of the Dairy Science and Food Technology website can obtain a 10% reduction in purchase price by quoting coupon number SP0611DSFT.

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