This week I wrote about comment macros, Git, track changes, response letters, shared bibliographies and merge conflicts. All of it came from reading and testing, not from watching your labs. So here is a question instead of a guide.
How does your lab handle a paper with three or more authors?
The setups I keep seeing described
Pick the closest one, or describe your own.
- Email and attachments. One person holds the master file. Others send edits back.
- A shared drive. One file in a folder, with a naming convention like
paper_v7_final. - Git or GitHub. The paper lives in a repository, with branches or pull requests.
- A live online editor. Several people edit the same project at once.
- A word processor first, LaTeX at the end. Draft in a shared document, then someone converts.
- Something else. A wiki, notebooks, a mix of tools.
What I would like to learn
- Which setup does your lab use, and how many authors does a typical paper have?
- What is the single worst moment in the process? An overwritten edit, a lost version, the last-week scramble, a co-author who will not learn the tool?
- What is one rule you adopted that made things better?
- If you switched setups, what made you switch?
Why I am asking
I work on LetX, a collaborative LaTeX editor, so I have a stake in how teams write together. The posts in this series are my best attempt at general advice, and they are only as good as the problems they match. Your answers decide what I write over the next weeks, so please be specific, and critical if you disagree with something I wrote.
If you want to catch up, the series starts with a 9-point checklist for choosing a collaborative research writing tool.
Next week the topic is choosing between tools: Overleaf alternatives, free plan limits, LaTeX versus Typst, and how to migrate a project.
Tell me in the comments: which setup is yours, and what is its worst moment?
