Thibault Lestang of Oxford University has a very nice video that makes the case for using Emacs and, in particular, Org-mode for academic research. He’s very interested in reproducible research and his talk is centered around the idea of Org-mode making reproducible research easy and natural.
A significant, recurrent theme of the video is the importance of keeping your document consistent. In this, it reminds me of Mike Hamrick’s video on producing consistent documents with Org-mode. The ability to call a code block dynamically for a value means that you don’t have write hard values for results and this, in turn, helps keep your document consistent as the data or its analysis change.
Lestang gives a demonstration of using Org-mode in this way so it’s a good resource for those interested in finding effective tools for organizing and reporting their research. He admits, in fact, that the video is meant as evangelism for Emacs for those who may not come to it naturally.
The video is 33 minutes long so you’ll need to block out some time but it’s an interesting talk and well worth your while if you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort to learn Emacs and Org-mode.