Journal finder and submission tracker for your lab's papers

I run a lab with several papers in flight at any time, and I want an internal app that replaces the submission planning spreadsheet we keep now. It has two main surfaces, a journal finder where I work out where a paper should go, and a manuscript tracker where I follow every paper through submission. The submission ladder in the tracker is the reason someone opens this weekly rather than once per paper, so give the tracker as much design attention as the finder. All journal data comes from Crossref, and each manuscript syncs to our lab Notion database.

On the journal finder page I enter a working title and a handful of abstract keywords for one manuscript. Use Crossref Search Works with those terms in the bibliographic and title query fields, filtered to type journal-article and to a recent publication window using the from-pub-date filter, defaulting to the last three years. Pull a few hundred results using rows and cursor paging so the grouping step has enough to work with. Send a mailto value on every Crossref request so the lab stays in the polite request pool.

Group the returned works by journal, keyed on container title and ISSN, and rank candidate journals by topical fit, defined as the number of matched works that journal contributed to my search. Show that count plainly next to each candidate, because it is the entire basis of the ranking. If a grouped title has no usable ISSN, resolve it with Crossref Search Journals before enriching. Let me also add a journal by hand through Search Journals when I already have a target in mind.

Enrich the top candidates, roughly the top fifteen. Use Get Journal by ISSN for the publisher name, the full journal title, and the deposit and metadata coverage counts Crossref reports. Use List Works in Journal with a from-pub-date filter covering the last twelve months to get recent publishing volume from the total result count. Run the same journal and window again with the has-license filter to get the share of recent articles carrying an open access license. Use List Works in Journal over the recent window sorted by is-referenced-by-count to fetch citation counts for recent articles and compute the median. Present all of this as a sortable comparison table alongside the topical match count.

Keep every ranking signal traceable to metadata the app actually fetched. Next to each number show the time window and the sample size behind it, for example how many records the median was computed from. Do not promise or estimate review turnaround time anywhere in the app, because Crossref does not reliably carry acceptance dates. Deposit and coverage counts from the journal record are a fair proxy for how well a journal is indexed, so label them exactly that way and never dress them up as an impact metric. State plainly that citation counts for very recent articles are still accruing, so the median reads low for the newest window.

From the comparison table I shortlist journals into a submission ladder for that manuscript, held in ranked order with my first choice at the top. I can reorder rungs by dragging, remove a rung, and add a journal to the ladder later. Each ladder belongs to one manuscript, and a snapshot of the signals that justified each rung is stored with it along with the date it was captured, so I can see why a journal was picked months later.

The tracker page lists every manuscript in the lab with its working title, its status, the date the status last changed, and which rung of its ladder it currently sits on, including the journal name for that rung. Status is one of drafting, submitted, under review, revisions, rejected or accepted. Changing a status stamps the change date automatically. When a paper is rejected, one click advances it to the next rung on its ladder, sets the status back to drafting or submitted as I choose, and stamps the date, so a rejection never means rebuilding the shortlist. If a manuscript reaches the end of its ladder, say so clearly and offer to run the finder again from the same title and keywords. Let me filter by status and sort by date last changed so papers that have gone quiet surface.

Opening a manuscript shows its ladder in order, with the outcome and dates recorded for each rung already attempted, a free text notes field, and a history of every status change with its date. This history is the record the spreadsheet used to hold, so keep it complete and readable.

Each manuscript syncs to our lab Notion database. When the app opens, use Notion Query a Database to load what is already there so the app and the lab wiki start in step, matching on a stored Notion page id where the app has one. Use Create a Page for a manuscript that does not exist in Notion yet and store the returned page id on the manuscript. Use Update a Page whenever the status, the current target journal, or the last changed date changes. Map working title, status, current journal, current rung number and last changed date onto Notion properties, and let me choose the Notion database and the property mapping in a settings view, so the app fits our existing schema instead of demanding a new one.

Persist manuscripts, ladders, status history and the Notion mapping in the app so the workspace survives reloads and every lab member sees the same board. Crossref needs no account, so the Notion connection is the only credential.