Technological stages in the development of scientific writing and their impact on the research process

Technology advances have revolutionized the process of producing scientific texts, from the era of manuscripts to contemporary artificial intelligence solutions. The authors conducted a historical and methodological analysis of the development of scientific writing and communications, highlighting key stages, including the printing press, typewriters, personal computers, office and special software packages, web tools, cloud services, optical character recognition (OCR) technologies, artificial intelligence tools, etc. The study compares the time spent on basic scientific operations in different eras (writing and editing; mathematical analysis; visualization; searching for and processing sources, and preparing the reference list). Automation drastically reduces the labor intensity of routine tasks, but the human role remains decisive; problem and hypothesis formulation, data interpretation, and responsible authoring cannot be delegated to algorithms. The paper discusses the information explosion phenomenon, which means that the growth of available knowledge bases increases processing capacity, but is associated with impaired long-term memorizing and the risks of mindless reading. The empirical outcome was a consistent technology timeline and a comparative workload table showing a multiple intensification of the research cycle. The conclusion is made about the auxiliary, catalytic role of artificial intelligence with the unconditional priority of human thinking.