Data Management
Of Index Cards and Spiral Notebooks
Your publishing career will create and require all kinds of data. You’ll need to:
- Record information about promising journals on your Journal Profile forms
- Monitor trends in scholarly publishing
- File ideas for papers, stimulating resources, and miscellaneous notes
- Enter tasks for researching and writing manuscripts on a calendar
- Track submissions of queries and manuscripts
- Note deadlines for revisions, copyediting and proofreading
The tools you use to manage this data can be high-tech or positively primitive – as long as they work for you. But it’s often a good idea to start with a low-tech solution, to experiment a bit with methods. Low-tech solutions also offer the added benefits of being impervious to computer crashes and malicious viruses!
Here are a few “old tech” solutions…

