Organize your papers in progress and follow each submission on one board
A Kanban board inside Xplore Academy: one column per stage, one card per paper, and zero credits consumed.
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What this solves
A paper in progress lives in several stages at once: writing, waiting on a co-author, submitted, under review. The Kanban gives each stage a column and each paper a card you drag from one column to the next. It opens inside Xplore Academy, keeps a separate board for each research project, and consumes zero credits.
How it works
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Open your board
The Kanban opens your personal board, already set up with the submission stages. If you have a research project active, it opens that project's board instead. The switcher in the header lists every board you have and creates new ones.
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Create one card per paper
Each card holds a title, notes and the fields of the board: date, journal, Qualis and anything else you add. Fields can be text, number, date, selection or checkbox, and you decide which ones appear on the cards.
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Drag the card as the work moves
Move a card between columns to change its stage, reorder cards inside a column, duplicate one that repeats, or drop it on the delete zone. Switch to the table view when you want to read every card at once instead of by column.
Method
What happens to your file, step by step, and where the result stops being a decision made by a model.
How it works inside
The board is stored as plain records in a Postgres database, through Supabase: one table for boards, one for columns, one for cards and a fourth for the definitions of the custom fields. Creating a board saves the board first, then the columns, then the fields; if a later step fails, the half-created board is removed so no orphan board appears in the switcher. Three templates exist: publication (To complete, To submit, Submitted, Accepted for publication, with the fields Status, Date, Qualis from A1 to C, and Journal), research (Next steps, In progress, In review, Completed, with Status, Due date, Type and Tool) and simple (To do, In progress, Done, with Status only). A deleted card or board is only marked as deleted, not erased; a deleted column is really erased and takes its cards with it. Opening a board is limited to the account that owns it, so a board from another account answers with a not found error (404). Titles and column names are stored in the language they were created in and translated on display through a fixed dictionary, so a board created in Portuguese reads in English with no change to the saved data.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
No language model is involved at any point. The Kanban code never calls OpenAI or any other AI service: no prompt is sent and no inference runs. Card order, the column each card sits in, and the value of every field are exactly what the person typed or dragged, saved as records in the database. Nothing on the board is generated, suggested, classified or summarized automatically.
What it accepts
- Text typed in the interface: board title, column titles and colors, card title, description and field values.
- Custom properties of five types: text, number, date, selection and checkbox. Any other type is refused.
- Limits applied on write: property name up to 100 characters, up to 30 options of up to 80 characters each, up to 50 property values per card, and up to 1000 characters per value.
- A select value outside that property's option list is discarded silently instead of being stored.
- With an active research project, the /kanban page opens that project's board instead of the personal one; creating the project already generates its board on the research template, with one starter card in the first column.
What you get back
- The board rendered as columns with their cards, and the same data as JSON through the /kanban/api endpoints.
- Each board has a public identifier of its own, which gives it a stable address you can bookmark. Cards also carry an identifier, but there is no page that opens a single card.
- Per card: title, description, position, the column it sits in and the values of its fields. Cards saved in an older format, with fixed date, Qualis, journal and authors fields, show those values in the matching fields of the board.
- The board list for the switcher, with the personal publications board always first and the project boards after it, in order of creation.
What this tool does not do
- Registered at a cost of 0 credits. There is no import and no export: no CSV, no XLSX, no PDF, no iCal. Data leaves only through the JSON API.
- No sharing and no collaboration. A board is created in one account, and only that account can list it or open it.
- No deadline alerts, notifications, recurrence or automation. A Due date field is a date field like any other and nothing reads it.
- No attachments. A card holds text, including a DOI and a link; it does not hold a file or a PDF.
- Deleting a column is permanent and takes the cards inside it. A deleted card or board is kept in the database, only marked as deleted, but there is no screen to restore it.
- Plan
- Starter
- Cost
- Free
What you get
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Costs zero credits
The Kanban is on the platform's free tool list. Creating boards, cards and columns, moving them and deleting them consumes nothing from your balance.
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Board and table, same cards
The board view shows the stages side by side. The table view shows the same cards as rows, with one column per field, when you need to compare deadlines or journals.
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Fields you define
The board arrives with the fields of its workflow, and the Properties panel lets you add, rename, hide or remove fields. What does not help move the work forward does not need to be on the card.
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One board per research project
Every research project you create gets its own board, with the stages Next steps, In progress, In review and Completed. The personal board for publications stays separate.
Changelog
Every line below is a change that actually shipped, dated by the day it went out.
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Latest
- Opening the Kanban with a research project active now shows that project's board instead of the personal one.
Show 5 earlier updates
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- A board created by mistake can now be deleted from the board header, with a confirmation before it goes.
- A board created from the switcher now starts simple, with three generic columns in the language of your interface, instead of inheriting the publication stages.
- Fixed: no new board could be created, neither personal nor from a research project.
- Fixed: empty boards nobody asked for no longer collect in the switcher when creation fails halfway.
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- Every research project now gets its own Kanban board, with the stages of the research workflow.
- The personal board is called Minhas Publicações again, and boards saved under the old name now show the new one without any action on your part.
- The switcher now keeps a stable order between the personal board and the project boards, instead of depending on which was created first.
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- The Kanban page now follows the light and dark themes of the platform, with contrast checked in the light theme.
- The gradients on the page gave way to flat surfaces.
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- Board and column titles now appear in the language of your interface, in Portuguese and in English, including boards created before this change.
- Pressing Enter saves a board or column title, without having to click somewhere else.
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- First version of the Kanban: a board for publications with one column per stage, cards you drag between columns, a table view of the same cards, and a zone to drop a card you want to delete.
Questions and answers
Is it really free, or free up to a point?
It consumes zero credits, with no limit on boards, columns or cards. There is one honest condition: the Kanban lives inside Xplore Academy and only opens for an account with an active plan (Starter or above) or an active trial. If the plan lapses, the boards stay saved but the page stops opening until the plan comes back.
Can I share a board with my advisor or my research group?
Not today. Every board belongs to the account that created it, and there is no invitation, no shared editing and no read-only link for other people. The Kanban is built for your own control of what is in progress, not for collaborative work in a group.
Does it import my references from Zotero or from a spreadsheet?
No. There is no automatic import: cards are created by you, one by one, or duplicated from an existing card. That is deliberate, since the board tracks what you are writing and submitting, which is usually a handful of papers, not a whole bibliography.
What comes ready when I open a board for the first time?
The personal board comes with the submission stages (To complete, To submit, Submitted, Accepted for publication) and the fields Status, Date, Qualis and Journal. A board created from the switcher starts simple, with three columns (To do, In progress, Done). A research project board comes with Next steps, In progress, In review and Completed, plus the fields Due date, Type and Tool. Every title arrives in the language of your interface.
How to cite this tool
Used it in your research? Here is the reference, already filled in with the version you are looking at and today's access date.
ABNT (NBR 6023)
LESSA, P. W. B. Kanban. Versão 2026.08. [S. l.]: Xplore Dados, 2026. Disponível em: https://xploredados.com/en/tool/kanban. Acesso em: 21 ago. 2026.
APA 7
Lessa, P. W. B. (2026). Kanban (Version 2026.08) [Computer software]. Xplore Dados. https://xploredados.com/en/tool/kanban
BibTeX
@software{xploredados_kanban_2026,
author = {Lessa, Patrick Wendell Barbosa},
title = {Kanban},
organization = {Xplore Dados},
version = {2026.08},
year = {2026},
url = {https://xploredados.com/en/tool/kanban},
urldate = {2026-08-21}
}
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