For the research phase, different digital professional services are offered on the market, such as carrying out surveys independently, obtaining (reliable and tested) datasets, mailing list samples, surveys, and complete statistical analysis from the professionals

For the writing phase, services offered enable authors to operate independently with automatic real-time corrections or with the support of professionals to check the manuscript quality

For the submission and review phase, professional digital services help the authors submit and re-submit their manuscript according to reviewers' comments

Publication services support the authors in marketing the published paper to increase scientific performance indicators

Academics are aware of multiple online digital services and software for academic research, but they adopt only a limited section

Differences exist according to different academic positions and ages

Scholars usually adopt the publisher's digital services to submit, copyedit and proofread the manuscript

Few scholars invested their time or effort in disseminating research results through social media or digital services or developing relationships with other researchers in the same research area

For scholars, digital services and software are beneficial in supporting scientific research work and preventing human error

Digital tools enable scholars to improve the quality and increase the number of research outputs

Online digital services and software have not radically changed scholars' research approach because the reasoning, mental path, research setting, and evaluation of the results have not been modified

Younger researchers who recently started working in academia are more familiar with digital services as they learned to use them during their PhDs

Scholars believe that digital services and software would increase in number and use, especially among younger researchers

Digital services and software would become more flexible, user-friendly, intuitive, integrated, customizable, have more automated procedures, and be interconnected with other software

Digital services and software would increase/improve their functionalities to detect topics relevant to the academic literature and not discussed in other papers, identify similarities or differences in comparison with content already included in other papers, and collect specific topics or theories

Some scholars suggest creating a forum grouping scientists to help to collect ideas and prevent research rejection

Scholars expect that academic journals and related publishers would improve their offering of digital services

Scholars expect efforts to facilitate the payment process for digital services, not to slow down the manuscript writing process

Scholars emphasized that in the future, machine learning and all related forms of artificial intelligence may improve the overall quality of the digital services and software