Sciflow Helps You to Write the Best Possible Research Paper
This story was migrated from our old blog, originally published on December 3rd, 2020.
Sciflow helps you to write the best possible research paper
Microsoft Word was never meant to write scientific papers in it
Carsten Borchert, Co-Founder Sciflow
Media Partnership
This interview is in media partnership with the CONTENTshif accelerator program (https://www.contentshift.de/en/accelerator/programme/for-startups/), which we follow since its inception. CONTENTshift is the accelerator program of the German Book Publishers and Printers Association. Below you will find more interviews from past batches. We used to record the interviews directly at Frankfurt Book Fair, but since it is canceled this year due to Corona, we resorted to remote only interviews.
Contentshift Winner 2020
The winner of this year’s batch is Sciflow (https://www.contentshift.de/en/contentshift/news/congratulations-to-sciflow/). We will publish the exclusive interview with them as the last of our series this year.
There is no software without an error. You just need to find them
Carsten Borchert, Co-Founder Sciflow
The Founder
We are talking to Carsten Borchert (https://www.linkedin.com/in/carstenborchert/), co-founder of the Berlin-based startup Sciflow (https://www.sciflow.net/en/). His life took him from an internship in South Africa through positions in well-known companies like Bertelsmann or Oracle. He learned how to sell software, which comes in handy right now. Carsten also holds a position in the alumni startup association of FU Berlin, where he helps startups founded by current or former FU Berlin students.
I was a software quality engineer and basically my job was to crash software. … That was a lot of fun
Carsten Borchert, Co-Founder Sciflow
Affiliate Links
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The Startup
The team behind Sciflow (https://www.sciflow.net/en/) originally met in 2009. But they only started the company back in 2014, because Carsten was frustrated with the tools available to write his Ph.D. thesis. So, he called his co-founder and told him that he wanted to write a thesis in Sciflow, so they started with the company.
Sciflow already provides common templates for certain journals already on their website. Have a look now, it may save you quite some time 😊
If your paper was not accepted in one journal, you can just change the template to one of another journal and do the submitting.
Carsten Borchert, Co-Founder Sciflow
The Video Interview is set to go live on Thursday, December 3rd, 2020 19:00 CET (Frankfurt, Paris, Milano, Zurich)
The Audio Interview
Further Readings / Additional Ressources
Latex https://www.latex-project.org/
Feedback
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The Interviewer
This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Transcript
Intro
[0:00] Music.
[0:16] Do Live Events hello and welcome everybody this is Joe from Stella burry Totoro your startup podcast and YouTube look from Germany
if you knew here to our podcasts just make sure to hit the like And subscribe button this time I’m bringing you again.
An interview with the accelerator program of the German book publishers
and printers Association diversify into storage and who handles the accelerator program is called content shift and this time finally yes we got the winner here we have custom here the co-founder of sciflow welcome.
[0:56] Thanks Joe for having me great to be here.
[0:59] It’s always a pleasure to have you here and for everybody who’s thinking like I did I’m a big science fiction geek I think I spent like 20 hours a week
listening tour
audio podcasts and set Scifi books especially before I fall asleep you guys are not related to science fiction and that’s exactly the point where half of the audience will drop out right.
I hope not sensors Sciences yeah it’s worth to talk about that too.
Carstens Vita
[1:31] Yes you guys are actually related to real science but let us talk a little bit about you first you guys are right.
Based in Berlin but I’ve stalked you in LinkedIn and as always if you guys go down here in the show notes there will be a link to our blog post and in the blog post there is a link to your personal LinkedIn profile so people can reach.
Talk to you directly
I’ve seen you’ve been with pretty big names you’ve been a software quality engineer you you did it sales with a well-known companies like battles man and Oracle but.
Actually you did a PhD in marketing as well so.
Take us a little bit through your journey how you ended up with the PHD and then starting to find a company because it’s a little bit uncommon I do believe but.
Not so much for scientific oriented start off switch you don’t have so much here in our podcast but we’ll have more there it is pretty common and I would actually count you a little bit
into the signs related startups enough set for me let’s talk.
[2:48] So it’s just to give you a little bit of my background so after school yeah I didn’t really know what to do
but for me the only thing that was obvious is that I wanted to work in the IT industry and.
I didn’t know exactly what to do so so I thought it out it would be a good idea to just just to learn how to develop software and I did that for three years
and
after that I realized I’m not going to be the best software developer ever and did an internship in South Africa and.
And got close to two IT consulting and after that went to bertelsmann worked at software quality engineer so I had to
basically crash software that was a that was a it was a lot of fun it was great doing this but,
but still I got here so that.
[3:51] Maybe if development is not my thing and the quality engineer it’s nice but it’s just not me doing this.
It would be a good idea to stay in the IT industry but work more in sales and then applied for Oracle at the sales position,
I was very lucky and very humbled that I got got selected.
And Tota position as account manager there for five years and so Erica
give me the opportunity to get to know it software sales and that’s a skill set I definitely can use as an entrepreneur at cephalo right now I’m
yeah it was weather,
good experience there and during during my time at Oracle I also did a PhD and in marketing so I actually had to look at,
how to say smarter from Oracle develops during the time when the when they buy a lot of companies so,
so I’ll record it over a hundred acquisition Acquisitions and again I had a look during my PhD thesis how how do you say smaller from from Oracle developed during that time.
[5:09] This for the geeky part of our audience yes I’m not a coating ich Eine science fiction geek but not less what type of programming languages do you use for coding.
[5:23] Oh well I started with c and then did a little bit of java as well but this is yeah 20 years.
Yeah 20 years past now
well more than 20 years ago I started out in school with coding and I started with to busk I know I never got Beyond Visual Basic for applications but at least I did a little bit of it.
[5:48] Then you especially learn how difficult that could be I’m talking about crashing software you got any tricks how to best crash software as a quality software quality engineer.
I think the most important thing is the goal of.
Of testing software is not to show that the software is perfect and has no mistakes the goal is to find those errors because those errors are in there there is no software which don’t have an error
I guess
it’s really about how to find them and of course it’s engineering disciplines so there is a structure to power process of writing test cases and execute them but I think the most important thing to keep in mind that every software has errors and then
just need to be fight I was wondering then you did held a position with the Free University of.
So right now I’m actually hold a position right now it’s sort of a Alumni Association for the startups from the fu Berlin
so when we started sciflow we were in close contact with two universities the University of magdeburg and the Fly only visited Berlin and both.
Supplied various support for sciflow.
[7:17] At first an office very important if you start up that you have a place to go in at work all the time for home but also but us in terms of
business model development and yeah and
getting in touch with some people for for various things you need to keep in track as an entrepreneur like Marketing sales Etc and those are those universities really helped us and,
I only visited to have sort of an alumni association for order startups and how to position there and it’s called Founders Circle and it’s just something where we meet once a month or every two months.
And talk about a topic that is relevant for all entrepreneurs last time we had last weekend we talked about branding.
And grants this was quite interesting.
So you have been a professional software crashed sure you also sold some software and you did a PhD in marketing and then you ended up.
[8:27] With a startup company what what took you there how did he get the idea how did you bump into the problem you want to solve.
[8:36] I will so first of all probably I always wanted to start a to start a start-up and this is.
Something that was always one of my one of my dreams what I wanted to do and during my during my master study,
I ran into a guy named Craig Eisler is co-founder of sciflow and that was 2009 so.
A long time ago actually and he is a software developer and yet this idea.
For a software that could help students to write their dear Master a bachelor thesis so he.
Yeah just problem that he always had to help his his student his fellow students.
[9:24] With all the formatting in word so when riding a bachelor or Master thesis students always said to.
Keep in mind that the formatting is right that the footnotes on the right page that the citation style is a correct applied.
And so on and so on a lot of things to keep in mind actually and Frederick helped us fellow students with that and as a software engineer he had the idea to automate this and that was like the
birth
the birthday for the cipher was born on that day because he thought okay if it’s possible
that students would use the text editor that is just designed for scientific writings a lot of things could be automated for example the creation of the formatting
and yeah as I said this was back in 2009.
We knew each other then and we’re thinking about to start a start-up then actually but it turned out we went to yeah we went to the corporate world
he was with cut Jiminy I was with Oracle and then 2014.
[10:40] We met again during the time I was writing my PhD thesis and I had to admit that actually not much changed,
in the last five years so from 2009 to 2014 and there were still no.
[10:55] Let me say tool that could really support researchers students in writing the thesis so of course
Joe you mentioned the Geeks out there they will know lattice they win a lot is for sure and this is
probably the most at this is something very common to write research with but there is also like most most students and researchers I’m still would use Microsoft Word and.
And this is this is something we strange because Microsoft Word was really
never designed to do two for a scientific writing and as I said in from 2009 to 2014 nothing changed there was no
tool there which could really support researchers students so 2014 we decided that we want to.
Start sciflow we want to.
Do something we want to support those researchers and students out there and in
publish their research there’s a they must be better way to publish their research and then 2016 we started with sciflow in full time.
[12:05] Hmm I really had to smile going back to the times of my master
thesis and when you set Microsoft Word was meant to write scientific papers
I’m actually sometimes with a formatting it feels like it was never meant to write anything on it I know Latin.
A lot a lot X it’s a scientific language to actually get the holy fancy stuff like the graphs and the formulas in there.
Staring Sciflow
[12:40] Okay now we are at the point in your life where you guys.
[12:46] First met want to found a startup back in 2009 which is by now 11 years in the past and.
Then you for some reason it started anyway what was what was the type of event what triggered to actually.
Get to get to start working get to the doing because you can talk about start-up ideas all day I do believe.
Dad to be a trigger something that actually did start to did kick off the the founding of the company right.
[13:25] Yeah you’re right that there was a trigger and I remember that day actually so it was
it was a summer day in 2014 and I was really frustrated with writing my PhD thesis because I tried louder it I tried word
and,
both software didn’t work probably as I wish they would work and further can I reset on my balcony outside and having a beer.
And I was like Frederick from 2009 to 2014 nothing changed there is still Microsoft Word is still lattice but this is
not something I would use to write my PhD thesis it doesn’t make my life easier
and then I told him that I was thinking about that I had to think about sciflow and that are actually wished that.
[14:18] I would could that use that to her right now to write my PhD thesis and that was like the trigger moment where we really start looking for first funding for scholarships and so on yeah.
Hmm when you go on the website there is actually you have some templates there already you have different.
You have different scientific manuscript templates like American physical Association ACS am a Chicago the Joan way of quoting dr. T Rosa
IEEE and so on and so forth and you have already Journal templates there.
What is the logic behind it and for the people out there listening to it and getting more or less excited or they’re tired of using.
Any tool at their hands to really start with a PhD that Master thesis that senior thesis whatever.
[15:20] Can you take us a little bit through what you would expect as as a client what is your ideal customer Journey something like this.
Customer Journey — Writing A Paper With Sciflow
[15:31] Okay so one of the key things we wanted to make sure in sciflow.
Is that students and researchers can focus on what is important to them
they’re actually research the actual research and they don’t need to worry too much about the formatting or even saving or the versioning of their documents so we wanted to simplify the writing
and Publishing workflow and.
You mentioned the templates and these are one of this is one of the key features in sciflow as a researcher I can go to the sciflow homepage and select manuscript of style
or a junit template that that.
I would like to use for writing my research for example if I already know that are went to write in nature that I can choose the nature template from sciflow but if I’m not sure yet and I’m.
Where I want to publish and just want to just want to template that is that is common in my research discipline for example you mentioned IEEE then I just selected template,
and start writing and I don’t and during writing I don’t have to worry about the formatting.
[16:51] Not at all I just focus on the writing and when you’re done,
you click X you click a button the export button and with that one click of a button sciflow text or year text if you’ve written and put it in the right format.
[17:06] And their various output formats you can think of so for example for those Journal templates we export a Word document
that is ready for the submission to the publisher but for a student of course you don’t want to export a Word document from several you want you would like to have a beautiful formatted PDF that you can take
directly to the to the to copy shop and printed out too.
To get it done and yeah and so we have different different types of exports in sciflow and this is one of the key features and of course it’s very.
It’s very important to mention since researchers.
[17:49] Usually don’t write their papers alone but in a team that sciflow is collaborative so
multiple authors can write at the same version of sciflow at the same time so that that’s why I always.
[18:07] To put it in simple words you can imagine.
Like several like a Google docs for researchers for Academia and with publishing capabilities I think this is yeah.
[18:19] Close to to what we trying to do there.
I had a lot of thoughts going through my head when you’ve been talking because at the versioning yeah I remember.
Late nights working on some papers.
I’ve said this beautifully where is it with it what was the version that oh damn did I save it no I don’t I did not save it so that’s all a thing of the past right with the with your tool.
Basically you save it online and you can do an undo any step again.
[18:52] Yeah exactly so formatting is a thing of the past you don’t have to do this anymore and I had another question is it like
Amita papers of basically could you for example if you are really aspiring PhD student and you type in an amazing paper can just use the text Graphics of formulas and all that stuff.
Exported into different formats for example for nature and for other journals that the same text the same content or can you just.
Do a paper for nature and then you have to start all new with one for another Journal.
[19:30] It’s possible to do that and actually some users yeah use cycle like this and.
Let’s take your example nature of course or researchers want to publish in nature because it’s such a high impact Journal
and you could select the template from
for secular for nature and you do the submission for nature but you’re not lucky you don’t get into nature
but of course you want to try a different journal and then all you have to do is select a different journey in sciflow export it again
and redo the submitting and that’s it or another example would be
in science more and more preprints are common so.
It’s not just like you take your research and publish it with a with a publisher like Stringer or elsevier but did you take your research.
[20:32] And put it on a preprint server where it’s open access accessible for everyone and of course those preprint servers.
Need formatting again and this is something.
We don’t have to worry in sciflow you just sector right template you want to use choose the right template
and then export it and again settled as the frequent formatting for now a lot of people there are really excited let us go down a little bit into the details
what kind of papers can you publish I would assume since you already have nature chemical formulas would work
pictures most likely would work.
Complex mathematical formulas what does work and what doesn’t can you for example also put the picture of molecule in there.
[21:23] Yeah so I would.
Like to mention like to do a talk about two points here so first of all.
Probably if you’re in physics if you’re in math you probably want to stick to lattice
actually because this is this is your perfect or to write complex equations and everything so I would really say that sciflow is aterna t’’v for all those researchers who are using
Microsoft Word in Google Docs right now and the second thing is so you mentioned chemical drawings.
We could talk about figures we could talk about charts and so on and so on so for every research discipline you need to keep certain things in mind that are very specific.
And so sciflow is very Anish program it’s just.
I meant for doing one thing right research and we don’t want to cover everything so what we are actually doing is try to integrate
all those very good tools that are out there and try not to redo them but instead of integrate them to sciflow so that the researchers can use their tools there.
[22:42] And they’re working with right now and sciflow and I think the most
yeah important example here is the talking about the references,
so there are lots of great see the reference when interest rate collect all your references and all your citations and so on and there are great reference managers out there well
well done programs that
I’ve been there for years and been a widespread it already and we don’t want to redo them in sciflow but integrate them and this is exactly what we did so.
[23:20] Citavi men delayed so terrible and note these are all
Twisted integrated to sciflow and yeah I think this is a good benefit for the users today they take
can stick to the today use programs all I have to do is to change from Microsoft Word to settle that’s the only thing I know friend of mine he wrote his PhD thesis in the late,
80s early 90s and he actually had to build up a database in access database to get his citations all there in place and you just.
Take this out with using already citation engine that’s already out there I was curious when you’ve been talking,
when you have like several authors it’s always a thing of reputation it’s always a thing of Pride who came up with a bright idea can you actually tell like after the paper is published and there’s one good idea all the colleagues love and then one of the author says
I wrote it was my idea can you actually then have a look who wrote which piece of the paper when you still have it in sciflow.
[24:28] The short answer is no we can’t do this.
[24:32] Oh anyway I do believe it’s a very interesting paper we all rather interesting idea too
make it easier to submit papers you’re integrating a lot of tools
and my understanding right now is that you’re not looking at mathematics at physics like we said with La Tech but I’ve seen medicine I’ve seen economic social studies stuff like this.
[25:02] Yeah exactly.
[25:04] Mmm great everybody would like to learn more about sciflow go down here in the show notes there is a link to.
Our blog post which contains the company website as always I say sorry guys there’s just one blog post if we have
ever to change anything we’ll do it on a blog post it’s just not feasible to change this in hundreds of places at the same time.
We are talking because you are the winner finalists and winner winner congratulations again of the content shift accelerated program 2020
and I’d like to get a tiny bit into what date can’t achieve for you and for what type of startups would you recommend day
re common date an application.
[25:57] So actually I have to mention a we we applied for Content shift.
[26:05] I think two years ago and didn’t made it to the final round and now two years later we actually the winner and this is something the team is very excited about.
As you may imagine so and it shows really the progress we’ve made over the last year’s so we knew about content shift for quite long time.
And I went to the website at the beginning of the year and so that the jury of the content shift,
is basically the Hua Sue of the German book industry.
[26:41] You find her you find whom will you find while a while a of course it’s very was very interesting for us because we are saying industry of.
Scientific Publications and accordingly isn’t was there and.
I thought like okay this is yeah this is basically the who’s who of the German book industry and I would.
[27:04] Be really Keen to get their feedback their views on sciflow.
And why not win 10,000 curious that would also be nice so
so we did the application we were selected for the final round and then there was the this great Workshop weekend
it was during the week but it’s called Workshop weekend starting off September where where we met for two days of course we kept our distance and wear masks all the time but those discussions there
and there is there was so much worth in it because.
These are these are the guys that know what I’m talking about and to get feedback from them from them as.
Is just great so I would recommend content shift to those startups who are of course in the content industry.
And I looking for feedback basically and since.
[28:06] I think almost every startup should.
Look for feedback basically I can recommend this program to any startup in the content in the content area it
if you made it to the to the final round where the workshop can the set definitely pays off and it’s worth the applique
I once heard in my life that there is there’s one word that describes startups that are not looking for feedback they’re caught dead.
Yeah so.
[28:42] Basically there was everything I want to ask you I just wish to thank you very much for being my guest and best of luck for sciflow and hope to see you again in the future.
[28:55] Thank you so much Joe for having me today.
[28:59] Music.
