Most Common Software Used for Scientific Papers, Graphics and Statistics

[becoming an engineer]

I would like to know what are the software tools most used to:

-write scientific papers;
-do graphics;
-do statistical analysis.

At the moment, I'm using LaTex to write my scientific papers, and R to make some graphics... What do you think about these?

 

[matt grime]

R is a (good, apparently; I don't know about these things) stats package, too.

(Almost) Everyone uses LaTeX to prepare papers. Dunno about the rest: what kind of graphics do you mean? Graphs, as in y=f(x)? Graphs as in vertices and edges?

 

[J77]

Yeah - LaTeX.

I use the Elsevier style file elsart.cls in all my notes too.

Graphics: produced as eps (close to the final print size), then labels added using the picture environment in LaTeX - you can also use the program 'sketch' to do this.

 

[jbusc]

Matlab and LaTeX are very, very popular...

though there are a lot of people who decide to do it in MS word. I wrote two conference papers in MS words and I will never, ever use MS word ever again after that.

When submitting to conferences/journals with specific formatting requirements it's nearly impossible to do it correctly in word, wheras it's easy as pie in latex, especially if a latex style file is given.

 

[Maxwell]

For engineering, MATLAB is a very big help for writing papers.