Disclosure up front: I make one of the tools on this list (Vitae, a free Mac app). I've tried to write the comparison honestly. Most faculty will still submit their tenure case through a system their university chooses, and nothing on this page replaces that. Vitae is a 0.1 beta; its entry sticks to what the shipped app does today.
What you actually need to track
A CV is the output. What you need to keep is the record behind it, and that record has three parts that most tools only partly cover:
- The finished record. Published papers, awarded grants, courses taught, committees served on, students advised. This is what a CV lists, and it is the part every tool on this page handles in some form.
- The work in motion. Papers under review and at which venue, revise-and-resubmit rounds, grant proposals pending, advisees partway through a degree. No CV shows this, but a tenure case turns on it: a committee reads a pipeline, not only a list.
- The documents you produce from it. The annual review, a job application, the third-year review, the tenure dossier. Each asks for the same facts cut a different way, usually for a specific review period.
There is also a fourth thing you do not get to choose. If your university runs Interfolio Review, Promotion and Tenure or Watermark Faculty Success, that is where the case gets submitted. Ohio State's faculty affairs office says candidates "use RPT to submit their materials"; Wright State made Faculty Success "the only acceptable medium" for tenure documents and annual evaluation in 2024. So the real question is not which system replaces your university's. It is where your own record lives between deadlines, so that filling in the required system is copying, not reconstructing from old emails.
The shortlist
- Interfolio Dossier: free tier, stores documents and confidential letters.
- ORCID: free, the persistent ID journals and funders ask for.
- Google Scholar profile: free, citation counts with no effort.
- A LaTeX or Word CV: free, full control, and the document is the database.
- Notion or a spreadsheet: free, flexible, you build the structure.
- Vitae: free, native macOS, tracks the record and the pipeline and generates the documents.
Those six are the ones an individual can set up today. Ten more are covered further down: the institutional systems your university may already pay for, a reference manager, and five smaller tools that each do one part well.
Interfolio Dossier
Cost: Free tier; Dossier Deliver is $59.99 a year. Platform: web. Data lives: Interfolio's cloud, with downloads available. Interfolio has been owned by Elsevier since June 2022.
Dossier is a place to keep files: your CV, statements, sample papers, and confidential letters of recommendation that referees upload without you seeing them. The free tier stores and organizes materials and applies to positions hosted on Interfolio. Deliver adds 50 deliveries a year and sharing with mentors. If your university subscribes to Interfolio's tenure product, you get a Dossier Institution account with it.
What it's good at: letters. Collecting confidential letters once and sending them to many applications is the job it was built for, and on the academic job market that matters.
What it lacks: structure. It holds documents, not records. It does not know your publications, submissions or grants; it knows the PDF you uploaded that lists them.
Pick Dossier if you are on the job market or need a home for letters. Keep your actual record somewhere else and upload the CV it produces.
ORCID
Cost: Free (ORCID is a nonprofit). Platform: web. Data lives: ORCID's registry.
An ORCID iD is the identifier journals, funders and university systems ask for, and the record behind it holds works, funding, employment, education and peer review. Many systems, including the institutional ones below, can import from it, so a current ORCID record saves typing everywhere else. You can export your works as BibTeX.
What it's good at: being the source other systems read. Update it once and your publication list follows you across employers.
What it lacks: teaching, service, mentoring and anything unpublished. There is no field for a paper under review, and ORCID does not produce a CV.
Pick ORCID if you publish. Everyone should keep one; it is a companion, not a system of record.
Google Scholar profile
Cost: Free. Platform: web. Data lives: Google.
A Scholar profile adds your publications automatically and shows citations, h-index and i10-index. You can export entries as BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan or CSV. For citation counts it is the lowest-effort option that exists, and it is what many readers of your file will check.
What it's good at: citation metrics with zero upkeep.
What it lacks: everything except published work. No teaching, grants or submissions, and the automatic additions need checking, because it will occasionally attach someone else's paper. There is also no public API, so other tools cannot sync from it.
Pick a Scholar profile if you want citation numbers. Pair it with something that holds the rest.
A LaTeX or Word CV
Cost: Free (Overleaf's free tier; paid plans from $98 a year for students). Platform: anywhere. Data lives: your file.
The oldest method, and still the most common: the CV itself is the record. In LaTeX, the moderncv class (actively maintained; version 2.6.1 shipped in June 2026) and Overleaf's researcher CV template give a clean result, and the .tex source is yours forever. In Word, the same idea with a template your department probably already circulates.
What it's good at: total control of the output. When a committee wants a specific format, you can produce exactly that.
What it lacks: any memory of things that are not on a CV. Submissions under review, rejected attempts, evaluation response rates and the story of a grant resubmission all live in your inbox instead. Every annual review means updating by hand, and every differently cut document is a separate file to keep in sync.
Pick a LaTeX or Word CV if the document is all you are ever asked for. If you write LaTeX on a Mac, our comparison of Mac LaTeX editors covers where to write it.
Notion or a spreadsheet
Cost: Free. Platform: web and apps. Data lives: Notion's cloud, or wherever your spreadsheet is.
A database you design yourself. Notion's template gallery has free academic trackers, such as Clarity Lab's submission tracker for scientific manuscripts, and Notion exports to PDF, HTML, Markdown and CSV. A spreadsheet with one row per submission attempt is the most common version of this, and it works.
What it's good at: flexibility. You can track exactly the fields your department counts.
What it lacks: anything you did not build. The structure is yours to design and maintain, and nothing turns the rows into a formatted CV or a tenure package; you still assemble those by hand.
Pick Notion or a spreadsheet if you enjoy building your own systems and already keep one for everything else.
Vitae
Cost: Free, no account, no limits on the record; an optional Plus subscription ($3 a month or $24 a year) adds reports, Word templates and other newer tools. Platform: macOS 15 or later. Status: 0.1 beta. Data lives: on your Mac.
I built Vitae because none of the options above keep all three parts of the record in one place. It is a native Mac app with structured records for projects, submissions, grants, teaching, service, mentoring and collaborators. Submissions are tracked per attempt, with each review round and decision date. Grants run from planning through award, with requested and awarded amounts and reporting deadlines. Courses carry evaluation scores along with response rates, because a 4.8 from a fifth of the class means less than it looks.
From that record it generates a CV, an annual review, or a tenure and promotion package for a chosen review period, with your narrative statements, and exports to PDF, rich text that opens in Word, or Markdown. A tenure view lets you enter your own bar (articles, lead-author papers, external funding, evaluation floor) against your tenure clock and shows where you stand, with publication projections given as a range rather than a single confident number. You can import an existing CV from a PDF to start, and pull citation counts from Crossref or OpenAlex by DOI or ORCID.
Where your data goes: your records are stored on your Mac, with no account and no sync. The app goes online only for lookups you ask for, such as citation counts from Crossref or OpenAlex and Grants.gov funding searches, and it reads your email only if you connect a mailbox, read-only.
What it lacks: a track record, and more. It is a 0.1 beta. It runs only on a Mac, with no iPad, iPhone or web version and no sync between machines yet. It does not submit anything to Interfolio or Watermark; you export and upload.
Pick Vitae if you work on a Mac and want the pipeline, the record and the documents in one place you own. It's a free download.
Ten more ways to track an academic record
The first four are institutional: your university buys them, you cannot, and if yours has one you will be using it regardless of what else you keep. The last six are smaller tools that each do part of the job well.
Watermark Faculty Success
Cost: Institutional licence, no public pricing. Platform: web.
Formerly Digital Measures Activity Insight, and used by more than 400 institutions. It tracks teaching, publications, presentations, grants and service, runs promotion and tenure workflows, and exports CVs to PDF or Word from the same data that feeds your annual report.
If your university has it, it is where your annual review and tenure case go. The catch is that the record belongs to your employment: change universities and you start again unless you exported it.
Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting and Review, Promotion and Tenure
Cost: Institutional licence, no public pricing. Platform: web.
Faculty Activity Reporting (formerly Faculty180) tracks teaching, grants and publications and fills CV templates. Review, Promotion and Tenure is where candidates assemble and submit the case and committees review it. Interfolio is part of Elsevier, which also makes Pure, below.
If your university has it, treat it as the destination, not the notebook. Keep your own record elsewhere and bring it here at each deadline.
Symplectic Elements
Cost: Institutional licence, no public pricing. Platform: web.
From Digital Science. It harvests publications from external databases automatically and tracks grants, teaching, supervision and service, with CV and biosketch generation. The automatic harvesting is the best of the institutional group.
If your university has it, check its publication matches, then let it do the typing. Same lock-in as the others. For NIH applications due on or after January 25, 2026, the biosketch itself must be completed in SciENcv (NOT-OD-26-018), so a biosketch generated here, or by any other tool on this page, is a draft to copy from.
Elsevier Pure
Cost: Institutional licence, no public pricing. Platform: web.
A research information system used by more than 500 institutions, with outputs linked to Scopus, funding and projects, and institutional CV templates exported to Word. It is built for research administration more than for the individual, and it does not track papers under review.
If your university has it, it will know your published work. Your pipeline still needs a home.
Zotero
Cost: Free, with 300 MB of storage; more from $20 a year. Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android.
A reference manager, not a CV tool, but many academics keep their own papers in it. Its My Publications feature publishes a bibliography page on zotero.org, and the data stays in a local database on your machine.
Pick Zotero if you want your publication list to live next to the literature you cite. It has no concept of grants, teaching or submission status.
Manuscripts (manuscripts-app.com)
Cost: $49 one-time, 14-day trial. Platform: macOS 14.6 or later, sold directly through Gumroad with in-app updates. It is not on the Mac App Store; an App Store edition is on its roadmap under "Later".
A focused Mac app for submissions: each manuscript's journal attempts, revision rounds and reviewer comments, stored locally. Not the older Manuscripts.io writing tool, which shares the name.
Pick Manuscripts if submission tracking is the whole job. It does not handle the CV, grants or teaching.
Papertrek
Cost: Free during its open beta; paid plans announced for 2027 at the earliest. Platform: web, hosted in the EU.
A web app for the paper pipeline from idea to publication: each submission and revision round, with reviewer notes and decisions. It imports from ORCID or a BibTeX file, new work on your ORCID record syncs in automatically, and you can export your data at any time. It does not cover grants, teaching or the CV itself.
Pick Papertrek if you want pipeline tracking in a browser and are comfortable with an early-stage product.
VitaMine
Cost: Free tier; VitaMine+ is €25 a year. Platform: web, invite-only early access; a local build is on GitHub.
A CV manager for the finished record: publications, grants, teaching, trainees, talks and service, with ORCID, OpenAlex and Zotero import, Word export, and a full download of your database as an SQLite file, which is an unusually honest exit. Custom Word export templates and importing an existing CV are VitaMine+ features. It does not track papers under review: its published database schema has no fields for submissions, status or decisions. Signing up needs an invitation code while it is in early access, and its terms describe it as a service that may change as it is refined.
Pick VitaMine if you can get an invitation, want a structured CV record in the browser, and do not need the pipeline.
Auctorium
Cost: $4.99 on the App Store. Platform: iPhone, iPad and Mac (iOS 26.2 or later; macOS 26.5 on Apple silicon), with optional iCloud sync.
A submissions and deadlines app: papers from idea to publication with co-authors and attachments, a list of venues, and several deadline types per submission (abstract, full paper, camera-ready) with reminders across devices.
Pick Auctorium if conference deadlines are what you lose track of and you want them on your phone. It does not handle the CV, grants or teaching.
Subthesis journal submission tracker
Cost: Free, no registration. Platform: web.
One of Subthesis's free research tools, introduced in November 2025. It records the fields a submission log needs: journal, submission date, manuscript ID, review status, decision dates and revision deadlines.
Pick the Subthesis tracker if you want a structured submission log without building a spreadsheet or creating an account. It is a log, not a CV tool.
Decision matrix
- Your university runs Interfolio RPT or Faculty Success? You will submit there. Keep your own record too, and export into it.
- On the job market? Interfolio Dossier, for the letters.
- Only ever asked for the CV itself? A LaTeX or Word CV.
- Want to design your own tracker? Notion or a spreadsheet.
- Only need submission tracking, on a Mac? Manuscripts.
- Want submission deadlines on your phone too? Auctorium.
- Want a free submission log with no account? Subthesis's tracker, or Papertrek if you also want ORCID import.
- Want the record, the pipeline and the documents in one app you own, on a Mac? Vitae, free.
- Everyone: keep ORCID current and claim your Google Scholar profile. Both are free and other systems read them.
How to keep a tenure case you won't have to reconstruct
Whatever you choose, the habits matter more than the tool. The dossier is assembled in one season, but the record behind it is five or six years long, and the parts that are hardest to rebuild are the ones nobody asks for until the end.
Log submissions per attempt, when they happen. Venue, date submitted, each decision, each round. Three years later, "rejected from two journals before acceptance, 14 months total" is a sentence you can only write if you wrote the dates down.
Keep teaching evaluations with their response rates. A committee reads a 4.8 from 90% of the class differently from a 4.8 from 20%, and the rate is rarely on the summary sheet you will find later.
Record service and mentoring as you go. Committee memberships, reviews completed, advisees and where they went. These are the easiest items to forget and the hardest to evidence afterwards.
Read your college's promotion and tenure guidelines now, not in year five. They say what counts, and in what categories. Track in those categories from the start.
Write a paragraph of narrative every year. The research, teaching and service statements are the hardest part of the dossier, and a paragraph written while the year is fresh is worth pages written from memory.
Update ORCID when a paper is accepted. The institutional systems import from it, which saves typing at every deadline.
Frequently asked
Do I have to use my university's system for tenure review?
Usually, yes. Universities that run Interfolio Review, Promotion and Tenure or Watermark Faculty Success require candidates to submit their case there. A personal tool does not replace that system. It is where you keep your own record between deadlines, so filling in the required system takes an afternoon instead of a month.
Is Interfolio free?
Interfolio Dossier has a free tier for individuals that stores materials and handles confidential letters. Dossier Deliver costs $59.99 a year and adds deliveries to applications. Interfolio's tenure and faculty-reporting products are bought by universities, not individuals.
Is there free software to track an academic CV?
Yes. ORCID and Google Scholar profiles are free and cover published work. Interfolio Dossier's free tier stores documents. Vitae is a free Mac app that tracks publications, submissions under review, grants, teaching and service and generates a CV from them. A spreadsheet or Notion template is free if you are willing to build and maintain the structure yourself.
How should I track journal submissions?
Record each attempt, not just each paper: the venue, the date submitted, every decision and review round, and the date of each decision. That history is what lets you answer how long a venue takes and what happened to a paper, which a CV alone cannot. Vitae, Manuscripts and Papertrek all track submissions this way, and a spreadsheet works if you keep one row per attempt.
Does ORCID or Google Scholar replace a CV?
No. Both list published work only. Neither records teaching, service, mentoring, grants under review or papers under review, and neither produces the CV your department asks for. Keep them current, because other systems import from ORCID, but keep your full record somewhere else.
What goes in a tenure dossier?
It varies by institution, so your college's promotion and tenure guidelines are the authority. Most dossiers include a current CV, research, teaching and service statements, teaching evaluations, evidence of service and mentoring, and external review letters that the department solicits. Everything except the letters comes from your own record.
Is there a CV app for Mac?
Vitae is a free native Mac app, for macOS 15 or later, that keeps your academic record locally and exports a CV or a tenure and promotion package to PDF, Word-compatible rich text or Markdown. Manuscripts is a $49 Mac app focused on journal submissions rather than the full CV.
Tools that work alongside any of these
Whichever system you keep, these free in-browser utilities help with the publication list itself:
- BibTeX Builder: paste your DOIs, get a clean
.bibof your own publications. - Citation Generator: format a paper in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE for a CV section.
- BibTeX Validator: catch missing fields and dead DOIs before a publication list goes into a dossier.
- Reference Converter: move a publication list between BibTeX, RIS and EndNote.
For the papers still in the pipeline, Paper Review red-teams a manuscript before a referee does: four reviewer personas argue over it, citations are checked against the live record, and figures are scanned for integrity problems. That one is paid, from $9 per review.