Not in many technical fields. When I was publishing in physics about a third to a half of my colleagues were using Word - all the top journals accepted it.
This was over 15 years ago.
CS and math are outliers.
With IEEE Word was even more common.
Currently a med student, and interestingly, some of the most renowned researchers in the world, not surprisingly, use Word. I know it strays from most of the users' fields of interest/research, but this is pretty funny, at least in my head..
For most people, LaTeX is pretty funny. Most disciplines did not use LaTeX. I'm sure there are plenty of big journals that never supported it. LaTeX became en vogue mostly in disciplines that involve a lot of math. Even in economics, a lot of journals were always majority Word.
Re:How to Read a Paper [pdf]
by OrderlyTiamat on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @11:29AM
(#38461502)
It's not the default everywhere- in fact the journal Science actually prefers docx, to the point of asking latex submitters to convert to docx before submitting!
https://www.science.org/content/page/science-information-aut...
It makes rendering mathematical notation very easy, also automatically tracks indices, references, labels, etc. I can even embed csv data to display as a table with a few lines of code!
It's also pretty straightforward to break down the paper into various folders and documents and import them all in a master .tex file, keeping your figures and data in their own folders too.
Can't imagine doing all of that in a bunched up in a word doc...
I mean, you can even do all the building in a container, so I often check in my work, push, and the CI builds the paper and makes a release depending on tag/branch.