Being early career as an academic researcher, publications are the biggest metric of success (or failure). The saying does go, “publish or perish.” I wanted to share how I keep track of my own publications. This system used to be analog, but I’ve finally gotten to the point in my career where I have too many projects and other floating responsibilities to rely on notebooks or paper calendars alone. This is where Trello has been a life saver. I’ve moved all my project management exclusively to Trello. In this blog, I would like to share my “Papers Pipeline.”

Picard pointing with text that reads "Publish or Perish. Make it so."

For those who don’t know, Trello is a project management platform that consists of “boards.” Boards are then made up of “lists” and the columns contain “cards.” Both lists and cards are moveable within a board. They can just be picked up and dragged to a new location. This makes for really easy task management. Imagine a board for writing a research paper. You might have 4 lists: to do, doing, done, and additional resources, notes, and information. To do list might contain cards labeled things like “draft lit review” or “finish introduction.” As these get completed, you can then move them along the lists from doing (as you’re doing them) and done (when they are done). These boards can have multiple users, so you can imagine the possibilities as multiple coauthors organize themselves around the task of completing a paper. (Yes, tasks can be assigned and there’s a commenting ability, etc.) I plan on having my students use this as a way to keep us all in communication for various research projects.

So, my paper pipeline is a board that I have starred and is at the top of my list whenever I log into Trello. My lists are as follows:

  • Ideas (things that might lead to good papers or seeds for future projects, essentially my “promise box”)
  • Needs reviewing and reworking
  • Data Collection
  • Data Analysis
  • Draft on Deck
  • With Coauthors
  • Out for Feedback (from labmates, etc)
  • Under Review
  • R&R (Revise and Resubmit)
  • Camera Ready (Final version prep)
  • Published (This is a good time to add to your CV!)
  • Dust Bin (Graveyard of papers/ideas that didn’t pan out)

Then within each of these lists, I have cards. There are cards for the start of a potential idea or something I want to come back to after I have finished current work. I rename cards as I go along and the paper becomes more coherent. I add labels for the papers I am lead author on or mentoring students on (thanks, Jen Nicholas for that great suggestion!). I can add notes or links to documents. I also attach other Trello boards that specifically are dedicated to each paper (with those to do, doing, done lists mentioned above).

In this image you can see the different columns or “lists” with each “card” as a different paper.

This method gives a really nice visual layout of the work. You can see right away if there is a backlog of papers on my desk that I need to get out for feedback or to coauthors. I can also quickly assess what’s currently under review (and potentially get a sense for what is coming back soon).

I highly recommend this method for getting organized. What have you found that helps? Are there other great tools that early career researchers should know about?