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.
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" unrecognized terms to sciPROOF. If sciPROOF recognizes the term, it will "instruct" Office not to mark the word as unrecognized (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.
Automated background spell checker or "check spelling as you type" is a feature of Microsoft Office that marks (underlines with a red squiggly line) misspelled or unrecognized terms. Unfortunately, this feature is a hindrance for scientific manuscripts since all technical terms are underlined (unrecognized) even when they are spelled correctly. Users must add terms manually which is time consuming and error-prone. Working with Office, sciPROOF resolves this problem.
Screen shots of a published abstract (source: US National Library of Medicine) in Microsoft Word with background spell checking activated.
Before installing sciPROOF and with the native Office spell checker activated, fifty-one correctly spelled terms were unrecognized and flagged with a red underline. These distracting red lines make it difficult for scientific authors to focus on legitimate spelling errors and this will cost time and increase the chances of errors. |
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After installing sciPROOF and activating the sciPROOF spell checker, only three terms were unrecognized. The native Office spell checker marked fifty-one correctly spelled terms in only a small sample of scientific text. This clearly demonstrates the power of sciPROOF and how it will save time and improve accuracy. |
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This example is a Word document with intentionally misspelled scientific terms. Before installing sciPROOF, the native Office spell checker does not provide spelling suggestions for any misspelled scientific terms as shown through the context ("right-click") menu. |
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This example is a Word document with intentionally misspelled scientific terms. After installing sciPROOF, the sciPROOF spell checker provides spelling suggestions for misspelled scientific terms as shown through the context ("right-click") menu. |
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It is clear from the above examples that the moment sciPROOF is installed, it will save scientific authors hours of proofreading and will improve accuracy.
Manual spell checker or "check spelling after you type" is a feature of Microsoft Office that allows the user to check the spelling within a special "spell-check" interface. Since sciPROOF and the Office spell checker work together, all non-scientific words from the native lexicon and scientific terms from sciPROOF can be checked through native spell checking interfaces depending on Office application: "Spelling and Grammar" dialog for Word; "Spelling" dialog for Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Project and Visio; "Check Spelling" dialog for Publisher.
This example shows native spell checking before installing sciPROOF. The native spell checker attempts to make suggestions for scientific terms but because of its limitation it can only suggest common, non-scientific terms. |
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This example shows native spell checking after installing sciPROOF. The native spell checker now suggests the correct scientific spelling because the sciPROOF database is activated. |
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Another example showing native spell checking before installing sciPROOF. In this case, the native spell checker has no suggestions for scientific spelling because of its limited vocabulary. |
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Another example showing native spell checking after installing sciPROOF. The native spell checker suggests the correct scientific spelling because the sciPROOF database is activated. |
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It is clear from the above examples that sciPROOF seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office and greatly improves the usefulness of the native spell checker for scientific text.
The sciPROOF spell-check interface is very similar in appearance and function to the native Microsoft Word spell-check interface. The sciPROOF lexicon contains over 250,000 scientific, medical and chemical terms from the US National Library of Medicine and works together with the native Office spell checker. This means that the sciPROOF spell checker works with all Office applications: Word, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher and Visio.
This is a screenshot of the sciPROOF spell checker activated in Word. The interface is very similar in appearance and function to the native Word spell checker. Like Word, the misspellings are highlighted in red in the edit box window. Please note that the other features of sciPROOF used within Word, such as style checking, reference searching, etc. can only be accessed through the sciPROOF spell-check interface. |
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The sciPROOF spell checker can check terms with symbols (e.g. GSgTadENaC) because its database engine supports Unicode. This example demonstrates sciPROOF spell checking terms with Greek symbols. The sciPROOF spell checker detects an unrecognized term with symbols (underlined in red) and suggests two similar variants from the sciPROOF database. |
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This section shows the similarity, in both appearance and function, of the native Word and sciPROOF spell-check interfaces. This further demonstrates the seamless integration of sciPROOF with Microsoft Office.
Citation numbers, added by the user or inserted by reference programs such as EndNote® Reference Manager® or ProCite®, create unrecognized terms (assuming that the "Ignore words with numbers" feature of Microsoft Word is not activated). There is a special "Ignore citation numbers while spellchecking" feature that is included in the sciPROOF spell checker. If a sciPROOF term is spelled correctly and includes a citation number, sciPROOF will ignore the citation number and "instruct" Office not to mark the word as unrecognized (remove the red squiggly underline). However, if a scientific term with a citation number is misspelled, it will be marked with a red underline as it should be.
When citation numbers are inserted through reference management programs such as Endnote®, this creates "new terms" that are unrecognized (underlined in red) by the native Word spell checker as shown in this example. |
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sciPROOF solves this problem with its "Ignore citation numbers while spellchecking" feature shown here. sciPROOF will ignore citation numbers while spellchecking and will only evaluate the spelling of the term. |
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This section further demonstrates the usefulness of sciPROOF for professional scientific writing.
The sciPROOF spell checker also works with all other Office applications including Outlook, Outlook Express, Power Point, Front Page, Excel, Access, Visio, Publisher, One Note and Microsoft Project as shown in the following examples. Note that in contrast to Word, the sciPROOF database is accessed and spelling suggestions are displayed only through the native spell-check interfaces in these other Office applications.
This section further demonstrates how sciPROOF improves Microsoft Office for professional scientific writing and editing.
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