👋 Welcome to the Research Document Dashboard! The RDD is a "single source of truth" for your collaborators when working on a research document. Read on to learn how to use it, and how to eliminate email chains and Zoom meetings from your paper- and grant-writing processes.

Here are the basics:

Example usage: writing a grant proposal

Let's say you're a faculty member coordinating between four different research groups to put a grant proposal together. Here's how you can do that with the RDD to save yourself a lot of time usually spent checking email or on Zoom. The same workflow applies to any research document you want to produce: an original research paper, a review article, or even a conference talk.

  1. Click Share in the upper right corner and add emails for your collaborators to invite them here. If you don't care about this being private, you can simply Share to web and send the link to all your collaborators.
  2. The RDD is pretty self-explanatory, so your collaborators should be able to find what they need and start working right away. A good place to start is by visiting Draft and setting up a single shared document (Microsoft Word on OneDrive, Overleaf, Google Docs, etc.) that enables real time collaboration. With this one easy step, the document will remain synced for all collaborators, so no more time wasted assembling different files from email chains.
  3. Next, fill out the , where you and your collaborators can add tasks that need to be done and decisions that need to be made, and assign people to each one. This can all be done without sending a single email! And by moving tasks from Not Started to In Progress and Complete, you always know the status of every part of the project.
  4. After there are some items on the and people know what their responsibilities are, it's a good idea to head over to and figure out exactly what software everyone will be using to put your document together and who is responsible for each thing. E.g., assign someone to be in charge of all the references - they will then pick their preferred reference management tool and collect references from all the collaborators.
  5. You can the entire document here too, so everyone knows what is going in each section. By creating a Task in the for each section in the , it's easy to see exactly what each person is working on.
  6. When questions come up like "Should Section 1 be split into two sections?" or "How can we make Figure 3 clearer?", simply create a New topic in the Brainstorm page and tag anyone with @ to get their feedback.
  7. If there's boilerplate text, raw figure components, or relevant papers that would be helpful for everyone to access, you can link to them in the .
  8. Finally, if you need help or would like to request some additional features, check out the Help Center.

Pro tips