Disclosure up front: Purplelink, the studio I run, makes one tool on this list, Vitae, a free Mac app, and sells the tracker spreadsheets described under spreadsheets. I have tried to write the comparison honestly, and in several cases something else is the better choice. Manuscripts is a more focused submission tracker for the Mac. Papertrek runs in a browser, which Vitae does not. A spreadsheet you build yourself costs nothing and does much of the job. If your university runs Interfolio or Watermark, you will submit your tenure case there whatever else you use. Prices and platforms were read on each vendor's own page on October 4, 2026, and they change. I did not test the other tools; the entries describe what each vendor's page says. Some vendor sites refused automated reading; where I relied on a search excerpt, or could not read a page, I say so. Enterprise systems publish no price, so I give none.
What you are tracking, and two kinds of record
A research record has four layers, and tools differ mostly in how many they cover:
- Published work. Papers, books, talks. Every tool here handles it.
- Work in motion. A manuscript under review at a particular journal, each revision round, the reviewer comments, a grant proposal pending, the effort you have committed. A CV shows none of it, and a tenure case or a grant renewal leans on it.
- Teaching, service, mentoring and reviewing. Easy to forget and hard to evidence years later.
- Documents made from the above. The annual report, the CV, the NIH biosketch, the promotion dossier. Each cuts the same facts a different way for a different period.
There are also two kinds of record. An institutional faculty-activity or dossier system (Interfolio, Watermark Faculty Success, Elsevier Pure, Symplectic Elements) is bought by the university, built for reporting and review, and usually mandatory. You do not choose it. A personal record is one you choose, hold in a form you control and take with you when you change employers. It can also hold what no one asks to see: the rejections, the timing, the grant you dropped. The sensible arrangement is both: keep your own record, and copy from it into the institutional system at each deadline. This page compares software for the personal record. For how to assemble a tenure case itself, see how to track your academic CV and tenure case.
The shortlist
- Vitae: free Mac app that keeps submissions, grants, projects and teaching in one local record and builds the CV from it.
- A spreadsheet: your own, or one of Purplelink's trackers ($9 to $14 each, $39 for the bundle).
- Notion or Airtable: a database you shape yourself.
- A dedicated submission tracker: Manuscripts for Mac, or Papertrek, Paperpin and Subthesis in a browser.
- ORCID and Google Scholar: free profiles for published work.
- Your university's system: Interfolio, Watermark and others.
- Zotero and plain notes: your papers next to your reading.
- A LaTeX or Word CV: the document is the record.
Those eight cover most situations. More tools follow, then what to log whichever you pick.
Vitae
Cost: Free, no account, no limits on the record. Vitae Plus, an optional add-on, is $3 a month or $24 a year with a 7-day trial, and is included for life in the $39 Mac Suite. Platform: macOS 15 Sequoia or later, Mac only. Status: version 1.0.1, which its page labels beta.
Vitae is a Mac app with structured records for submissions, grants, projects, collaborators, teaching, service and mentoring. A submission keeps its venue, dates, each review round, the decision, manuscript versions and a cover letter. When you pick a target venue it shows published acceptance rates for about 13,700 journals and conferences, and it forecasts publication timelines from your own history. A grant runs from planning to award with requested and awarded amounts, your share and reporting dates, and the app can search Grants.gov and fill an NSF or NIH award from its number. You can connect a mailbox read-only, and Vitae proposes updates from journal-system messages; you review each one. A tenure view counts your record against expectations you enter, such as articles, funding, h-index, talks and service.
The CV is built from the record. You can import the CV you have, from Word, PDF, RTF, ODT or a web page, and check every parsed entry before it saves. Pick a format, a length and a date range and it fills itself in. Export goes to PDF, LaTeX or rich text that opens in Word; Word (.docx) export with your own templates is a Plus feature. There is also RIS export, aimed at Interfolio, Watermark and reference managers, and one-click send to Zotero.
What it's good at: covering the work in motion and the finished record in one place that lives on your machine. Everything is stored on your Mac with a daily backup and undo, and the free tier is the whole record.
What it lacks: it runs on a Mac only, with no Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad or web version. Records are not synced between machines; the page says iCloud sync is supported in the data model and may be enabled in a future version. It is a one-person, one-computer record: I found nothing on its page describing shared editing, so coauthors are people you record, not people who log in. It does not submit anything to Interfolio or Watermark; you export and upload. The revision workspace (which splits a decision letter into reviewer points and exports a response letter), the NIH biosketch and Current and Pending drafts, Word templates and ORCID sync are Plus features. It is a new app with a beta label, and the forecasts and counts are only as good as what you enter.
Pick Vitae if you work on a Mac and want the pipeline, the record and the CV in one place you own. Pick something else if you are on Windows or Linux, need to work from a phone, or want one record that several people edit. Vitae is a free download.
A spreadsheet
Cost: Your own: whatever you already pay for Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Purplelink's trackers: $12 each for the submission, tenure and grant trackers, $9 for the job-market tracker, $14 for the screening matrix, $39 for all six with the Grant Budget Builder. Platform: Purplelink's are .xlsx files that open in Excel and import into Google Sheets.
A spreadsheet with one row per submission attempt is the most common personal tracker, and it works. Record the journal, the date submitted, the manuscript number, each decision and its date. The failure is the rest: reviewer comments, grants, teaching and service end up in other files, and nothing makes a CV from the rows.
The Purplelink trackers, which I make, skip the building. The Journal Submission and R&R Tracker keeps one row per round and counts days in review, flags a revision that is overdue or due soon and an editor worth nudging, and has a matrix for reviewer comments. It holds 150 rounds and 400 comments. The Tenure and Promotion Dossier Tracker has five logs (publications, grants, teaching, service, mentoring) measured against targets you set. No institution's standards are built in, and it tracks progress, not the likelihood of a decision. The Grant Pipeline and PI Effort Tracker follows up to 100 proposals through stages and adds up each person's committed effort. It does not know your sponsor's effort rules and does not connect to a grants system.
What a spreadsheet is good at: any platform, no account, a file you own, and Google Sheets lets a coauthor see it. What it lacks: everything is typed by hand, nothing produces a formatted CV or a dossier, and the Purplelink files have row limits and one worksheet per job rather than one connected record.
Pick a spreadsheet if you want something plain, you are on Windows, or you want to share it with a coauthor. Build your own if you like that, buy ours to start from a finished design, or choose Vitae if you want the CV generated.
Notion or Airtable
Cost: Notion: free; Plus is $10 per member per month, and students and educators with a school email get Plus free for one member. Airtable: a free plan for individuals and small teams; Team is $20 per user per month billed annually. Platform: web, with apps.
Both are databases you design. Notion's template gallery lists several academic trackers, including "Submission Tracker - Scientific Manuscripts", "Manuscript Submissions Tracker", "Paper Tracker" and "Research Project Tracker". I did not find an academic submission tracker among Airtable's templates, though it has a grant tracker template aimed at nonprofits. Either can hold submissions, grants and teaching in linked tables.
What it's good at: linked records, views by deadline or status, phone access and sharing. What it lacks: the structure is yours to design and keep tidy, nothing turns the rows into a CV, and the record lives on the vendor's servers, so test the export before you rely on it.
Pick Notion or Airtable if you already run your work in one of them and enjoy building.
A dedicated submission tracker
Manuscripts (manuscripts-app.com). Cost: $49 once, 14-day free trial; all 1.x updates are included. Platform: macOS 14.6 or later, Apple silicon and Intel.
Manuscripts is a Mac app for the submission lifecycle: drafting, review rounds, revisions, authors, journal submissions, deadlines and decision letters. Its page says there is no server and that data stays on your Mac with automatic backups on launch; one license covers up to three Macs, and lab licenses exist for five or more people. Its page mentions nothing about grants, teaching or a CV.
What it's good at: being focused. If papers are the whole job, it is a simpler tool than Vitae. What it lacks: everything outside submissions, and it is Mac only. Pick Manuscripts if you only track papers on a Mac and prefer to pay once. Pick Vitae if you also want grants, teaching and the CV. Papertrek, Paperpin and the Subthesis tracker, covered below, are the ones to look at if you are not on a Mac.
ORCID and Google Scholar
Cost: Both free. Platform: web.
ORCID is a not-for-profit registry that gives you a persistent identifier. Its record has eleven activity sections, including works, funding, employment, education, service and peer review. You can add works yourself or let connected systems add them. One limit worth knowing: peer review items can only be added through its API, not typed in. Many systems read from ORCID, and for NIH applications due on or after January 25, 2026, the biosketch and Current and Pending forms must be completed in SciENcv with your ORCID iD linked to your eRA Commons account, according to NIH notice NOT-OD-26-018. Any biosketch draft from another tool, Vitae's included, is something to copy into SciENcv. ORCID has no place for a manuscript under review or a decision, and it does not make a CV.
A Google Scholar profile needs a Google account. It computes total citations, h-index and i10-index, both overall and for recent years, and updates them as it finds new citations. You can add articles by search, enter them by hand, or let it add new ones automatically, and automatic additions are worth an occasional check for papers that are not yours. It tracks published work only.
Pick both if you publish. They are the cheapest, lowest-effort part of the record, other people look at them, and keeping them current takes minutes. They are not a system of record for anything unpublished.
Your university's system
Cost: Paid by the institution; no public price for any of these. Platform: web.
Interfolio, which is part of Elsevier, sells Faculty Activity Reporting and Review, Promotion and Tenure to universities. Its pages describe the first as a place to collect teaching, research and service activity and export it to CVs, promotion files and annual reviews, and the second as where candidates assemble their case, pulling from the first or from institutional systems. Both say to request a consultation for pricing. Watermark Faculty Success, formerly Digital Measures, covers teaching and mentoring, publications, presentations and grants, service and administrative data such as appointments and tenure timelines, and produces CVs, biographical sketches and annual reports; its page directs institutions to contact sales.
What they're good at: they are the official record. Deans and committees read from them, and they pull in course data, grants and HR data so you do not retype it. What they lack: they hold what your institution asks for, in its categories, for as long as you are employed there, and they are built around reporting more than around your own planning. Ask what you can export before you change jobs.
If your university has one, use it for what it requires, and keep a personal record in the same categories so each deadline is copying, not reconstruction. Elsevier Pure and Symplectic Elements, below, are the same kind of system.
Zotero and plain notes
Cost: Zotero is free with 300 MB of file storage; 2 GB is $20 a year, 6 GB $60, unlimited $120. Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Zotero is a reference manager, not a record of submissions or grants. It does one thing well for this job: its My Publications collection builds a bibliography of your own work and can share it on your zotero.org profile, with copyright options. Keep your papers there if you keep your reading there. A plain folder of dated notes, one file per paper with the decision letters pasted in, is the low-tech option: it survives any software, and a text search finds what you need.
Pick Zotero as a complement, not a replacement. It has no concept of a grant, a review round or a course.
A LaTeX or Word CV
Cost: LaTeX is free; Overleaf's free plan allows one collaborator per project, the student plan is $8.25 a month billed annually, Standard is $199 a year. Word templates come with Word or from your department. Platform: anywhere.
The oldest method makes the CV the record. In LaTeX, moderncv offers five ready-made styles, its current version is 2.6.1 (June 2026), and it ships with TeX Live and MiKTeX. In Word, the template your department circulates is usually the right one. If you write LaTeX on a Mac, see the Mac LaTeX editors comparison, and for browser editing the Overleaf alternatives guide.
What it's good at: total control of the output, in exactly the format a committee wants. What it lacks: memory. Papers under review, rejected attempts and grant resubmissions live in your inbox, and each differently cut document is another file to keep in sync. Generators fill the gap: Vitae builds from your own records and exports LaTeX, and SigmaCV is free, open source and builds a CV from ORCID, OpenAlex and Crossref into PDF, DOCX, LaTeX or Markdown. Pick a hand-made CV if the document is all you are ever asked for.
More tools
Each is real and useful to someone. None is on the shortlist because one of the eight above covers the same ground for most people, or the tool solves a narrower problem.
Papertrek
Cost: Free while in beta; paid plans arrive in 2027 at the earliest, with a free tier planned. Platform: web, hosted in the EU.
Tracks a paper from idea to published: submissions, revisions, reviewer notes and decisions. You connect ORCID or drop in a BibTeX file to import, and its page says you can export or delete everything at any time. Grants, teaching and the CV are not on its page. Pick Papertrek if you want a submission tracker in a browser, on any computer, and accept an early-stage product.
Paperpin
Cost: Free, no card. Platform: web.
Its page lists deadlines for more than 600 conferences and 75 journals, manuscript status, rebuttal windows and decision dates; I have not checked those counts. Pick Paperpin if conference deadlines drive your year and you want a free web tracker.
Auctorium
Cost: $4.99 on the App Store; I could not confirm whether further unlocks are sold in the app, because its website did not load. Platform: iPhone, iPad and Mac, on OS version 26.2 or later.
Tracks papers with venues, coauthors, attachments, several deadlines per submission and reminders. Pick Auctorium if you want deadlines on your phone and are on a recent Apple OS. It does not cover grants or a CV.
Subthesis journal submission tracker
Cost: Free, no login. Platform: web.
A form-style log with the fields a submission record needs: title, journal, date, manuscript ID, editor, status, decision dates and revision deadlines. Its page says the data is kept in your browser's local storage, with export available, so switching machines loses the log unless you exported. Pick it if you want a free log without an account.
VitaMine
Cost: Free tier; VitaMine+ is 25 euros a year. Platform: web, with invitation codes for early testers.
A CV manager built on a structured database: import an existing CV or biosketch, sync from ORCID, OpenAlex and Zotero, download the whole thing as an SQLite database, and export to Word templates. Its page says selected CV text goes to OpenAI if you use AI-assisted import. I found no submission or deadline tracking on its page. Pick VitaMine if you can get an invitation and want a browser-based CV record.
Interfolio Dossier
Cost: Free tier; Dossier Deliver is $59.99 for 50 deliveries. Platform: web.
A personal account for career materials and confidential letters of recommendation, with free applications to Interfolio-hosted positions. It is the place for letters on the job market. It stores documents, not records. Pick Dossier if you are applying for positions.
Elsevier Pure
Cost: Institutional; its page says contact sales. Platform: web.
A research information management system used, per its page, by more than 500 institutions. It brings together publications, funding, people and projects, syncs with Scopus, ORCID and HR and finance systems, and powers researcher profiles. It is built for research administration. If your university has it, expect it to know your published work and your funding; your pipeline still needs a home.
Symplectic Elements
Cost: Institutional; its page says book a demo or contact the company. Platform: web.
From Digital Science. It harvests publications from PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Crossref and arXiv for you to claim, picks up grants through its Dimensions integration, and records teaching and professional activities, with faculty activity reporting on top. The harvesting means less typing, if the matches are right. If your university has it, check what it matched, then let it fill in the rest.
Web of Science Reviewer Recognition
Cost: Free to reviewers, according to Clarivate. Platform: web.
Formerly Publons. You opt in, and reviews for participating journals (Clarivate's page counts more than 9,500) are added to your Web of Science Researcher Profile as verified, without exposing the review, and the profile can produce a CV that includes them. It records reviews you do, not manuscripts you submit. Clarivate's page refused automated reading, so this entry rests on a search excerpt. Use it if you review a lot and want evidence for a promotion file.
Journal systems: ScholarOne and Editorial Manager
Cost: Not sold to authors; the journal's publisher licenses it. Platform: web.
The system a journal uses is itself a tracker. ScholarOne's Author Center, per Clarivate, shows your submitted manuscripts, recent correspondence and status, with prompts for a revision. Editorial Manager lets authors track manuscript status. Each journal picks its own system, so your history is spread across logins. It is the authority on one submission and a poor place to keep the whole record.
ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Semantic Scholar
Three profile sites. ResearchGate calls itself a professional network, is free to join, lets you claim publications and shows reads for work you upload. Academia.edu is built around uploading and sharing papers; its site refused automated reading, so I give no price. Semantic Scholar creates an author page automatically from public papers, and you can claim and correct it. All three are about visibility of published work. None tracks submissions, grants or tenure.
What to log, whatever tool you pick
The tool matters less than the habit. The aim is that the dossier, the annual report or a grant renewal is an afternoon of copying. The existing tenure case guide covers the dossier side; this is the record underneath it.
For each submission attempt:
- Venue, manuscript number, date submitted and the version you sent.
- Each decision, its date and its verdict, and the editor's letter saved whole.
- For each round: the reviewer comments, your response and the date you resubmitted.
- The outcome, and when it is a rejection, where the paper went next. "Rejected twice, 14 months to acceptance" can only be written from dates.
For each grant: sponsor, mechanism, your role, date submitted, requested and awarded amounts, your share, the effort you committed, reporting dates, the outcome and the reviewer feedback. Keep the unfunded ones; resubmissions start there.
For teaching, service, mentoring and reviewing: course, term and enrollment with the evaluation score and its response rate; committees with the dates; advisees and where they went; the journals you reviewed for and the year. Log a review by journal and year, not by manuscript title, and check the journal's confidentiality terms.
Once a year: write a paragraph on what the research, teaching and service added up to while you remember. Update ORCID when a paper is accepted. Tag each item with its year so a review period is one filter.
Decision matrix
- Mac user who wants submissions, grants and the CV in one place? Vitae, free.
- Only papers, on a Mac, and you prefer to pay once? Manuscripts, $49.
- Papers in a browser, on Windows or Linux? Papertrek or Paperpin. For a free log with no account, the Subthesis tracker.
- Deadlines on a phone? Auctorium, or a spreadsheet in Google Sheets.
- Want a plain file you control? A spreadsheet, or the Purplelink trackers at $9 to $14.
- Already live in Notion or Airtable? Build it there.
- Publishing at all? ORCID and a Google Scholar profile, both free.
- University runs Interfolio, Watermark, Pure or Elements? Use it for what it requires, and keep your own record.
- Reviewing a lot? Web of Science Reviewer Recognition.
How to choose
- Find out what your university requires. Ask your department which system the tenure case and annual review go into, and what you can export.
- Decide what has to be on a phone. If you need a record on a phone or on two computers, rule out any tool that is local to one Mac, Vitae and Manuscripts included.
- Count how many things you track. Only papers: a tracker or a spreadsheet. Papers, grants and teaching: Vitae, a database or several sheets.
- Check the exit. Before you enter five years of history, find the export. A file you can open elsewhere is worth more than a feature. Then test the tool on one real paper and one real grant.
Frequently asked
What is the best software for tracking journal submissions?
On a Mac, Manuscripts ($49 once) or Vitae (free) track each attempt, round and decision; Vitae also covers grants and the CV. In a browser, Papertrek and Paperpin are free for now. A spreadsheet with one row per attempt also works.
Is there free software that tracks submissions, grants and a CV together?
Vitae does, on macOS 15 or later. Its record-keeping is free with no limits; an optional paid add-on covers reports and Word templates. Elsewhere, a spreadsheet or Notion setup can hold all three if you build it, but nothing formats the CV for you.
Do I still need my own record if my university uses Interfolio or Watermark?
Yes. The university's system holds what the institution asks for, in its categories, while you work there. A personal record keeps the rest, such as rejections and timings, and moves with you. At each deadline you copy from it into the required system.
Do ORCID or Google Scholar track papers under review?
No. ORCID is a registry of works, funding, employment and similar items, and Google Scholar counts citations to published work. Neither has a place for a manuscript's status or decisions, and neither makes a CV.
Does Vitae work on Windows or iPhone, and does it sync?
No. Vitae runs on macOS 15 or later only, and records live on your Mac with no sync between machines. Its page says iCloud sync is supported in the data model and may be enabled in a future version. For a phone or a second computer, use a web tool or Google Sheets.
Is a spreadsheet good enough?
For submissions, usually yes, with one row per attempt and every decision date. It struggles once you add reviewer comments, grants and teaching, because the pieces end up in different files and nothing builds a CV from them. Purplelink sells ready-made trackers, so weigh that disclosure.
What should I log for each submission?
The venue, manuscript number, date submitted, the version sent, each decision with its date and verdict, the reviewer comments and your responses, the resubmission date and the outcome. Save each decision letter whole. Then a paper's history and a venue's turnaround come from fact.
Related guides
- How to track your academic CV and tenure case: sixteen options and how to build the case.
- How to respond to Reviewer 2 and what to do after a desk reject.
- What Vitae Plus adds, the Mac Suite, the spreadsheets and all guides.