Google Docs

Writing a paper: version management problems
Writing a manuscript with a group of authors directly poses a version management problem. A classic approach is that the first author writes a first draft, emails it to the coauthors, who all suggest improvements that they then send back to the first author who then integrates these into a new version. This  has multiple disadvantages.  First, as long a the draft is with the co-authors, the first author has to wait for input and cannot work on next improvements. Also, the co-authors may have  conflicting suggestions  on  the same sentence or text part, and  it may be a lot of work for the co-author to integrate all suggestions and changes into a new version. It is not a good solution to put a Word .docx file in a shared google drive folder, as this easily leads to conflicting copies 

Solving version management with Google Docs
As a text editor, we recommend Google Docs with .gdoc as the file format. This is because Google Docs has imporant version management benefits over Microsoft Word:

• A .gdoc file exists only in a single version in the cloud instead of a .docx Word file where different collaborators can each have their own version on their laptop

• All edits are changed in the history of the file, if accidentally an important part is deleted it can easily be retrieved from an earlier version of the same document

• Multiple collaborators can edit the file simultaneously

• Zotero can be added as a reference management