Paper Authoring Tool (PAT)

Extend PAT to meet your needs

PAT is being extended to a Paper and protocol Authoring and annotation Tool, keeping the PAT acronym, in recognition of the fact that this approach to study reporting can also be extended to study design and annotation. The existing tool can be used for all these purposes, but work is ongoing to making the protocol and annotation use cases more specifically covered in the user interface.

The vision is for this tool, or others like it, to become the standard way for researchers to design, report and annotate trials, and for the functionality to be expanded to all major categories of intervention evaluation. This would form the heart of a research ecosystem that would arguably improve the effectiveness and efficiency of research by an order of magnitude.

PAT is at a very early stage of development. If you have specific requirements for extending PAT, as a journal, scientific society, research funder, or research team, this section explains how you can get involved.

Examples of features that could be funded include:

Direct integration with your journal or service
Authors submit to you from within PAT, with their paper already structured the way your reviewers need it.
Expanded study types
Expand the types of study covered to additional ones, including longitudinal observational studies, cross sectional surveys and qualitative studies.
Unification with ontologies and other services
Consistent, machine readable terminology across every paper written in PAT, drawn from the vocabularies your discipline already uses.
Something else
If it would make reporting in your field clearer or more consistent, it is worth a conversation.

Get in touch to discuss your ideas

We consider every proposal carefully, and we do not build everything we are asked to. Anything added to PAT has to be a genuine benefit to the research community and has to sit within what the tool is for.