<aside> đź’ˇ This template was created by: Katherine S. Cho, Ph.D. | For questions or to learn more about her work and see other templates, check out her site & contact form: www.katscho.com
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Research projects are often intertwined with related publications, grants and other funding opportunities, as well as opportunities to present at conferences. Organizing these often feel tricky because of how they’re tied to one another. As a result, research project tracking often feels like a jumbled mess— some projects have multiple papers attached to it without any funding; other projects have multiple sources of funding but only tied to one paper; and still others are instances where I’m presenting multiple projects at a single conference. This guide is meant to serve a possible way to organize and track everyone together. Feel free to click the upper right-hand corner and “duplicate” this template, erase the entry text, and modify as you see fit! My only request, in keeping this a free resource is that when you’ve made the template your own, send me an email, message, or ping (contact info above!) of how you’ve used it~
For each of the different sections of the “Academic Research Pipeline” template, feel free to read each of the different introductory texts and play around with the view features.
The “Research Project Template” is geared towards offering a single “one stop” for your research projects. The “Project” tab opens to what I often link to the necessary documents or drives (e.g. GoogleDrive, SharePoint, OneDrive, EverNote, etc.) so that I don’t have to dig into other systems. While the “table view” offer an overview of all the different connections, I (Dr. Cho) personally prefer the “priority view” that utilizes Notion’s “kanban board” view where I then utilized the “…” and “properties” to show the different connections.
I like having this database because I often lose track of manuscripts OR I find myself struggling with what to prioritize. This gives me a good sense of where each manuscript is AND I use the “short name” open feature to keep links to the drafts, final submissions, and other info, like journal requirements or if applicable, call to proposals.
The different views of the manuscript are based on different filters of manuscript stages— drafting vs. after the submission process, and then celebrating that it’s published. For the “drafting” (and also “all” view since that’s every manuscript), I made the check-marks based on what are typically empirical-based social science research articles: the proposal (e.g., intro, lit review, theory research design), to the data collection, analysis, drafting of the latter half of the manuscript, editing, and finally submitting. Feel free to change and adapt the columns as you need but just make sure that the “to pipeline” formula reflects that changes with the same property names and that if you add or delete properties, that the column number reflects that! Feel free to adapt the “under review” columns as needed too!
If you want resources on writing, whether how to create a writing group, or academic publishing stages, etc., here’s some tips and advice on my site. Feel free to also explore “out-sourced” where I have other resources I often like to reference and use myself!
Remember, being successful with grants, fellowships, and opportunities isn’t just about having great projects or well-written proposals, but also about make sure you apply to things in the first place. You can’t get an opportunity if you don’t try it in the first place, and you can’t try it if you forget or lose track of it! Within the “open” for each grant or fellowship, I usually include the call for proposals, various drafts, and brainstorms or even email templates to ask for letter of recommendations, etc.
Tip: A column/property I like to add (but might not applicable) is a “Year or Stage” option. A lot of times, I hear about opportunities that I’m not applicable for YET, and the question is: how do we keep track of future opportunities. For those, I like to have them as future years and create another view where I filter and sort those for later (similar to how the sort feature is used for the “manuscripts” database). It’s a way to me to remember things like, when I was a doc student, the dissertation fellowships, or now as pre-tenure, those post-tenure opportunities.
Similar to grants, you’ll never be able to submit (and subsequently present) at a conference if you don’t know where to submit. I built this to reflect the conferences (where in the “open” tab, I keep track of the websites, call for proposals, etc.). One column/property I also like to add is when proposals are due, which is often months prior to the “date” property.
If you don’t know where to look for conferences and you’re in the field of (higher) education, I keep a running list on my website so check it out. On the same site, I also keep a list of resources on things like how to submit a proposal, templates, etc.