Overcoming Challenges in Collaborative Projects using Version Control

Collaboration in research projects remains a key feature for successful outputs, yet traditional methods, such as emailing drafts, using cloud storage, and manually tracking document versions, often lead to version control issues, inefficiencies, and opaque collaboration processes that hinder teamwork, slow progress, and limit cross-disciplinary integration and reproducibility. This publication highlights a shift in research partnerships through the adoption of Git and GitHub tools originally designed for software development but increasingly embraced by scholars—to address major challenges in collaborative research, including tracking edits from multiple contributors, preventing overwrites, and providing a centralized repository for documents and discussions, ultimately enhancing the pace of advancement, the synthesis of diverse viewpoints, and the reproducibility of results.