Scientific Writing — a Quarto extension to aid scientific manuscript writing

[lsbjordao]

Description

Hi everyone! 👋

I'd like to share Quarto Scientific Writing, an extension I built to help write cleaner, more rigorous scientific manuscripts. You add a single filter and your rendered HTML turns into an interactive writing reviewer — it annotates the document in the browser with style, structure, and linguistic diagnostics, all computed client-side.

🔗 Repo: https://github.com/lsbjordao/quarto-scientific-writing

✨ What it does

• Inline highlights — long sentences, passive voice, hedging, ambiguous connectors, wordy phrases, repetition, nominalizations, colloquialisms, and optional spellchecking.
• Per-paragraph & per-section notes, an always-visible Document Analysis card with prioritized issues + suggestions, and a panel of 70+ document-level metrics.
• Readability scores, focus mode (click a metric to isolate matching paragraphs), regex search, and Markdown report export.
• Scholarly structure checks: in-text citations & references against ref.bib, DOI validation via CrossRef, figure/table cross-reference coverage and citation order, and numeric evidence tracking — separating parameterized values (_variables.yml) from hard-coded numbers.
• NLP via compromise.js + wink-nlp.
• Bilingual — English and Portuguese, auto-detected from lang:.

🚀 Install

quarto add lsbjordao/quarto-scientific-writing

filters:
  - scientific-writing

HTML output only, sensible defaults — nothing to configure to get started.

🧹 Drafting vs. publishing

The review UI is a drafting aid. For the final published version, render a clean, lightweight HTML with none of it:

quarto render --profile publish

🔒 Privacy

Everything runs locally by default. The optional NLP CDN, DOI/CrossRef validation, and LanguageTool spellcheck are the only features that reach external services (and the last two are off by default).

It's MIT-licensed and just hit v1.0.0. I'd love feedback, bug reports, and ideas — and PRs are very welcome. Thanks for taking a look! 🙏

[mcanouil]

@lsbjordao Thanks for sharing, this looks really great.

You might want to also share it on the quarto.org listing: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web/tree/main/docs/extensions/listings

And also on my Quarto extensions directory which has more advanced filtering/sorting/search features while also powering Quarto Wizard for easy install/updates: https://m.canouil.dev/quarto-extensions/about.html

[lsbjordao]

Thanks!

Sorry for the delay in replying.

This extension was developed for a course I will be teaching on reproducible scientific writing. The goal is to provide students with a structured Quarto environment that encourages reproducibility, consistency, and good scientific writing practices from the beginning of their projects.

I will submit the PR on listings and understand how to share on your Quarto extensions directory!