Streamline Draft Reviews with the Manuscript Approval Tool (MAT)

Collaborative writing is at the heart of academic research—but anyone who's tried to manage multiple manuscript drafts across email threads, Word documents, or cloud drives knows how messy it can get.

At ResearchDock, we’ve built a manuscript approval tool that takes the chaos out of collaborative editing. Whether you’re preparing a conference paper, journal submission, or internal report, our tool makes it easy to manage versions, track changes, and reach consensus—without losing your mind.

Why We Built This Tool

We heard the same pain points from researchers again and again:

“I don’t know which version of the manuscript is the latest in the email chain.”
“There are comments spread across five different versions.”

Our manuscript approval tool solves this by bringing version control, difference highlighting, and comment collation into a single workspace. It's built for research collaborations!

✨ Key Features

Here’s what makes our manuscript tool different:

✅ Automatic version comparison
Every time you upload a new draft, ResearchDock highlights differences from the previous version. No more "what changed again?"

✅ Comment collation across versions
Comments from collaborators are automatically grouped by version, so nothing gets missed.

✅ Approval tracking
Want to lock in a version before submitting to a journal? Mark it as "approved" so everyone is aligned.

✅ Cloud-based and centralized
Everything is stored within your project on ResearchDock—no scattered Google Docs or email attachments.

🛠 Tutorial: How to Use the Manuscript Approval Tool

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how to start using the manuscript approval tool on ResearchDock.

Step 1: Upload Your First Draft

Navigate to your project.
Click the Manuscripts tab in the side menu.
Click Upload Draft and attach your document (we currently only support .pdf).

Once uploaded, your draft is visible to all project members, and they will receive a notification.

Team members can add inline comments on specific sections or paragraphs.
Comments can be filtered by collaborator and are timestamped and tagged with the commenter’s name.
Easily reply to comments and discuss changes
Once you're satisfied with a version, click the green tick to approve. A green “Approved” badge will appear on that version.

Step 3: Upload a New Version and see changes

Upload the latest version of the manuscript as a by pressing Upload Manuscript Draft.
ResearchDock will automatically compare the new version with the previous one and highlight what has changed

Ready to Try It?

If you're already on ResearchDock, just go to any project and click the Manuscripts tab to get started.

If you're new to the platform, sign up here!

👋 Want more features like this?
We’re actively building tools for researchers, so if there is anything that you would want to manage your projects, contact us here.