Even worse, doing this in the middle of writing the paper is a context switch that adds its own overhead. Any time spent on filling these in could easily be saved by the hypothetical genie. For historical reasons, this list contains journal/conference name, year, volume, edition, and page numbers! Some of these, especially the last few, have become fairly irrelevant for recent publications. Today that list is usually in the form of a bibtex entry. This, especially a few hours before the deadline, is a tedious process, involving translation of the mental pointer I have to a particular paper, into a list of its distinguishing features that would allow the reader to locate the paper.

First is the question of creating the bibtex entries. Let me elaborate on these inefficiencies. While I understand this is a “first-world-problems” post, I am hoping some of you will suggest solutions that we will all find useful. It wants to get even closer to the genie ideal. But the engineer in us is greedy, and wants to remove inefficiencies wherever it sees them. Needless to say, bibtex makes it a lot easier than it would be otherwise. There is one aspect however, that I think still lags behind, and adds overhead: the creation of bibliographies. I think it is safe to say that with these tools and a little bit of experience, nearly all the time spent on writing is spent on figuring out and polishing the content: if we had a genie to layout the text and all we had to do was conjure up the words and the preferred layout, it would not save us much time. Maybe make a long distance call to read out and discuss the introduction? Or maybe write weeks in advance to allow shipping/faxing the paper draft back and forth! Email makes it possible to do near real-time co-writing, and today version control tools make this task significantly easier. I have no clue how people not at the same physical location co-wrote papers before the Internet.

With the advent of computers, people began to use tools like troff, until we got tex, and then latex, making life much easier. Only a few decades ago, I hear, CS papers were typewritten, with hand-drawn figures and hand-written greek letters.

Autocomplete texshop