Ambiguity about concept of baud rate and bit rate
"Baud rate" means "raw symbols per second".  For binary symbols (like RS-232), it's synonymous with "raw bits per second".

Manchester encoding is a poor fit to this model, but if you wanted to squeeze it in, then a symbol period is equal to a bit period, and there's all the weird Manchester encoding rules that need to be followed.

For RS-232, baud rate = raw bit rate, and that includes the start &amp; stop bits.  For instance, 1200 baud means a bit time of \$833\mathrm{\mu s}\$, and that applies for all bits.  So if you're sending 1 start, 1 stop, and 8 data bits, the fastest you could transmit payload bits would be \$1200\frac{8}{10} = 960\$ bits/second.

Typically, in the literature the term "baud" has become clouded because it's often conflated with "bits/second", and with more complicated modulation schemes like OFDM the exact meaning of a "symbol" can be up for debate -- so if you're authoring a paper, it's a good idea to make it clear what you're talking about independent of the term.