How to Write a Scientific Journal Article Using Overleaf - Academic Writing Tutorial in LaTeX

[Music] today's video is sponsored by overleaf all of their information will be linked below hello everyone and welcome back to my channel in today's video i'm going to be talking you through how to write a scientific journal article and in particular i'm going to be focusing on the specific software that i use that makes all of my academic writing so much quicker and easier and if you're not using this i would strongly strongly recommend using overleaf for all of your academic writing i've been using it for about three years and i can't imagine how anybody can use anything other than that for academic writing in case you're new here my name is kira and i'm a third year phd student based in dublin ireland and i study machine learning and computer science let's talk about software for academic writing so comment down below what software you're currently using for academic writing and what might be some pros and cons because i'm always interested in knowing what other people use for different things there's always going to be something you might come across you've never seen before i recently did a poll on my instagram and i was shocked and frankly disturbed to find out that the majority of you i don't know if it's a different audience here on youtube but the majority of people on my instagram are using either microsoft word or apple pages for their academic writing so this is really more of a overleaf tutorial than an academic writing tutorial but i think it sort of has a bit of both and that's because partially when i did share about you know whether people like to use microsoft word or pages or whatever or something like overleaf the amount of messages that i got from people who said they'd never even heard of overleaf or latex and really wanted me to do some sort of video where i'm going through some of the basic functionalities so i hope that this will be really helpful for anybody who's thinking about getting started i'm glad that i spent a little bit of time in the summer before my phd getting started because the second that i started working with my supervisor it was straight into writing a document in overleaf so if you're getting started and you're going to be collaborating with other professors or whatever i do definitely recommend getting into overleaf even if you're in a further state along and you think at this point it's too late to start learning it i really don't think it is you will thank yourself because you will save yourself so much time the amount of time you'll end up having to reformat things throughout your phd if you have a document where it's all just doing this automatically for you honestly you'll save yourself so much time and i'll talk about a few different ways in the video that you can see that overleaf who sponsored today's video is a collaborative cloud-based latex editor i'll be going through some of the unique features that make using a latex editor so much better than using just a normal text editor like microsoft pages but essentially latex is a software system where you're writing in plain text as opposed to formatted text like in microsoft word and the reason why it's better to work in plain text it means you can actually go ahead and do a lot more customizable things and you can also load packages which will format things for you rather than having to go through the steps in microsoft word where you actually have to change the font size and adjust things like that for a specific conference you may be publishing to you don't have to do any of that in overleaf because you'll just load in a package and it will do all of that for you i think a lot of people are quite intimidated by latex because it does require what looks like code i don't know if i would really consider it that but if you can use something like notion then you'll have absolutely no problem using overleaf and i'm going to be going you through the basics of the different sort of things that i use overly for but if you ever get stuck honestly i get stuck every once in a while i'll forget how to do something or i'll be trying to do something new in overleaf that i haven't necessarily done before all i do is i just look it up and there's usually a really good guide from overleaf or from somebody else that will have a really good explanation for how to do it and you can just copy and paste whatever is there and then fill in your own version this is largely how i learned how to use overleaf because there's no class or anything in my university on this but i'm going to be teaching you some of the basics of that now so here we are in my overleaf so you can see i have a bunch of projects going on there but essentially when we want to start a new project we'll just go in here and you can see there's a bunch of different options for what we can do there so if you want to look we can go through like various templates so this is one of my favorite things about overleaf is that there are all these really nicely formatted templates that you can choose from so for example all of these different conferences and everything like that so a lot of the time when you're going to publish to either a scientific journal or conference or an academic conference or whatever it is there will be a formatting guide and either you would have to do that yourself which you do in either your word document or whatever or you could just use a really handy overleaf template and work away on that so we're going to use this template here um so let's open this as a template and you can see all of this loads up so the way we have this in overleaf we have two sort of screens one is going to be the actual source text that we're working with you can basically ignore most of what's here and then on the right hand side we have our fully formatted pdf and this usually has a bunch of different examples of different things that you can do just so that you have a sense of how you actually do all of this and so this will format absolutely everything so it will do all of the like numbering of images the numbering of sections so if you decide on a later date to you know add a new section or add a new image you don't have to go back and re-number all of these things so if you're working on a smaller paper it might not be a big deal but when you come to do your phd thesis and it's going to be hundreds of pages long with who knows how many sections and who knows how many images that if you decide to move around things it's so annoying to have to go and reformat all of that it's so much easier to just have this automatic process where when you add all of this information it will do that by itself so you can also work if you don't want to if you don't really feel comfortable working in the source you can also work in rich text which is a little bit closer to using a formatted word document and so like you can then go ahead and you know do different things yourself it'll give you some hints so you can for example pop in section heading and it will put that in for you so then you can say new section and that's a little bit easier if you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by working with the other side i would definitely recommend working in the source just because it is i suppose you can do a little bit more in terms of how powerful it is so a lot of this initial information so here you'll notice that we are in the tech file you can't fully see the name there but it's a dot tech file and this is going to be your actual file that we're working in and filling in all of our information all of these others are you know different guides and this is going to be our bibliography and this is just an image for the example image as this one here is going to be a lot of the actual info so a lot of what's in this green these are all comments so these are just information people have decided to add in but we don't need any of that so a couple of things we'll have we have copyright information so that's usually going to be the journal that does all of that and then we're beginning our document here so in terms of the coding elements a lot of what you're doing is going to be backslash and then whatever it is that you're doing so here we just have backslash title the name of this title is hope and then we have all of our author information so this is going to be how we write in an author and it'll sort of depend what template you're looking at so basically if i was taking over this template all i would do would i would basically put in my sample title whatever it is and then i would change all of these i wouldn't like delete all of this information because how the information is laid out here is usually how they want it laid out then when we want to put in our own information we can just recompile and then it will put in our new information it does take a little second but then you'll see that it's all like really well formatted so i'm just gonna get out of here so you can see now i've got my name in here instead and then the sample title is what i put in okay and then these are all still authors so we're putting in all of the detailed information for the authors which may or may not show up on the paper itself then when we're getting into different sections the first that we have is our abstract so we have begin abstract here and again we can just delete whatever is in here and put in our own points for abstract so i'm just going to go ahead and delete all of the rest of the stuff in here just so that we can start working with it properly okay so we've got all of that information now basically when we're trying to do different sections the command that we use is the backslash and then section um introduction so that's how we make a new section and it will become totally formatted whatever way we want great so this you can see this one is numbered so if i go ahead and add in some more sections you can see that the future sections that i add will be numbered as well so these are the sections that i've added for this work and this will be typically how a scientific paper would be laid out you'd have an introduction that sort of frames the problem that you're trying to solve as being important and why basically it's interesting to be studied why it's important to be studied then oftentimes in scientific papers which is something that i'm in the process of learning moving from a more computer science paper to a science paper is that we have a method section which is typically a short section and then you usually have a separate supplementary section with all of the rest of the methods then we have results which is very black and white here are the results and then a discussion which allows for more interpretation of the results and often we'll be bringing in literature here to back up some of what you might be discussing in the discussion and then lastly we have our conclusion which just sort of wraps it up and usually you'll have a bit of information about future work in there the difference i've found so far in computer science papers i think we typically have this sort of introduction and related work section and then a more detailed method section within the paper of like the models and everything and then an evaluation which does include a lot of discussion and then a conclusion so it's just a bit different but i think that is this the main difference and then let's say we want to add in some subsections then so what we would do is we would add in just by typing in backslash subsection so let's just say result one and then if we want even a sub sub section we add that in and that's sort of as far as it goes with subsections you don't want it to become too messy if it starts to have this many it probably means that you need a bigger document which probably isn't necessary in most and it'll very much depend depending on what template you're using how all of this does get formatted but just so that you can see how these look i'm gonna compile this okay so this is how it's composed here one thing that's really handy about sections and the way things are done in overleaf is that you can actually reference different sections so you can add a label so this is what i'm doing here i'm adding a label so then if i'm talking in let's say the discussion and then i say as per section ref results actually what's usually handy in the way that i would do this is i would also just add a little thing that lets me know it's a section and not a graph but you can see now that when i've added this bit of text in underneath the discussion it will say as per and it will number the sections for me there's a discussion yeah as per section three and then this you can see it actually even has a link there so i can click on it and we'll go so if you have more specific labels to different sub sub sections it'll allow you to go to those different places which is really handy if you're constantly referencing your figures and your tables and your sections throughout your document if it's all automatically formatted like this so that means if you're adding new things if you're moving things around all of that will happen automatically so it means you don't have to go back when you've changed a section from 3.2 to 3.3 and go back and change all of those because it will do that for you which i think is the most handy thing if you're working on any large document okay so let's say in our method section we need to do some equations so this will be more for like a scientific or mathematical paper but again essentially what we'll be doing here is starting an equation we will begin and then in curly brackets we're going to say equation and then that will just end the equation so it knows where to start and stop and you can sort of write in anything here and so you could say x plus y equals seven and it will format this as an equation see so we have a number on this equation again so if we want we can add a label and this will mean that later on when we're referencing it we can say equation what is going on so we can say as per equation ref equation and then we should be able to see in our method section how we can reference that and again these are numbered which is really helpful so in terms of making equations you can do pretty much anything anything for like integration so you can do pretty much any mathematical symbols in here usually anytime i have to do any sort of complicated equations i will look it up and the same thing goes for any algorithms you can do the same thing so i'm just going to look up an example this is usually how i will find new things to do in overleaf so if i need to figure out how to do an algorithm i'll look up you'll see i've already looked this up before so let's just throw this in you can see there's typically like really good examples of different things that you might want to do and this one's actually nicer so let's include that and again you might need to include these packages i'm guessing these are already included just because it is a an acm example so let's just check oh maybe not so basically i just want to put this outside of the begin document so wherever we have the document so now when we recompile this this is all in there so that just shows how that works and again we can add labels to all of these things and that means that they will be easier to reference later on same thing when it comes to doing any tables so we might want to have some tables in our results section so again we can just look up we have a whole section here on how to do that so you can see all different types of tables ones that have open ones that are lined ones that have things like this so let's see what type do we want to do this is an interesting type because it has sort of a multi-line element let's just do this really simple looking one here so this is going to use a package multi row which you probably have to add in when you are doing any papers for a specific conference or journal you usually don't want to change whatever their formatting guide is so if they haven't used certain um packages then you may not want to and some of them will be not liking that but some of them won't mind but it's just good to make to maybe check that in advance so let's go ahead and add this table in and then we'll recompile and again everything that i'm showing we will add labels to if we're referencing them and then when we're trying to change the data basically we'll just change these things in here and this will change whatever's in here so if we want to change this to 99 that comes through so it's easy enough to do things like that the next thing that i want to show is how to create some sort of figure so so we will just use begin figure and then it will sort of automatically do some stuff for us already so centering will just make sure that it's in the middle of the document and a label it will add so we i would usually have that so you can see it's sort of a default to put in the fig my label and then include graphics so this is going to be looking for one of our figures from somewhere in here so usually what i would do is i would create a folder called figs and i'll put any figures for the paper in here so we can do upload and what you can do is you can drag any pictures that you might have and then you can see that we have in our results we have as per where did we write that in oh yeah as depiction in figure one and again these are all labeled you can see our captions come in there as well so those are some of the basics in terms of the sort of things that you can include in the document and how you can then reference those the main thing that i think is so exciting about it is like the automatic formatting in terms of the document like we don't have to put anything in place to make sure that these are the right size it will just sort of come out that way and in terms of the actual labeling of things as well it's just so convenient so the next important thing i suppose about this is that when it comes to doing our references at the end of our document when we've been referencing you know and citing different materials formatting the bibliography or the references section is really really handy in overleaf um so i believe this will do this already for us so you can see that we have over here the sample base dot bib so we have a bunch of example bib entries these are bibliography entries you can see that this is an article this is the key name so it's by patricia s abral and robert plant the pa the patent holders dilemma buy sell or troll from communications of the acm and it just has all of the information so when you're going to look up a paper so let's just say if we go on to the reason i use google scholar for this is it just always has the bib file entries so let's look up cura fili so let's look at me so these are all my papers here and you can see to cite the paper we've got all of these options so you can always copy and paste these into your word document however it's much better to have the bib entry which is like this that you can then put into a rolling bib file so i for this obviously i'm just using the example but i will typically have a rolling bib file that i use for all of my papers and my thesis which every time i have a new paper that comes out either one of mine or one that i added to my literature review i will just add that to the rolling bib file and this will always contain everything that i need so if i go back to our paper then and i want to reference one of these so let's say we're just going to do this the results section for example and then what we're going to do here is a backslash site and then whatever our reference is so if this one does have mine yeah okay i realized i deleted the bibliography which is not ideal so i am going to pop that back in and that should hopefully so this is telling us to use the acm reference format for our bibliography and you can see now that when i'm citing all of these things so if i want to cite myself as well it should come up and then we will have all of these showing up in our references and again it'll organize the references depending on whatever reference style the conference wants sometimes that's alphabetical sometimes it's by order of appearance you never know but basically as you continue to cite different things throughout the paper it will all just show up in your references now i know that there is like plugins you can use for word and everything like that but to me nothing is handier than just having one big bibliography file and then just being able to upload that into any paper and then just having access to all of your references really easily so once basically the most important thing is going to be having them labeled properly so i wouldn't say that this is a good label what i would usually have would be feely 2020 and then a keyword so i would have said something like um race time prediction something like that because i know what that paper would mean then so that means it's a lot quicker when loading up the papers so it also makes it really easy to collaborate with authors so first of all you can share with a bunch of people so you can type in their emails and then they will be shared you can either share as a read only or a edit and you can also turn on different things so you can basically when you're doing any edits one thing that you can do is track changes so that means that when you make a change they'll all come in here so if there's one main person working on the paper and one person who would just be doing small changes then and you want to be the one to approve them you can have that come through so this is where the sort of review comes through this a b review so you can have no i'm not going to accept that change or yes i am going to accept that change and it just makes collaboration really easy and i've always found collaborating on documents kind of difficult but i think with overleaf it actually makes it a lot easier and you can see where other people are in the document i think google documents is okay for that as well but you know it doesn't have the rest of the functionality that i think overleaf does in terms of other applications of overleaf i've been slowly moving all of my writing into overleaf i think when i started using it it was still like a little bit daunting so i started by just having like word documents and then moving stuff in slowly and now i've started just like any time i'm starting a new document i'll move things in there and i've even started to use it for things like my cv just because it's a lot cleaner in terms of how it comes out and you can see they have all these different templates that really make it um easy to use for large files so for example we have to do a stage two transfer which is where you write sort of a 30 page document around your sort of thesis it's almost like a proposal but it's not quite and that has different chapters so the way that i organize that then is you have different dot tech files within the same overleaf that will be each chapter and i found that's a lot cleaner and easier to use than having one big word document and or having multiple word documents that you then can't reference between so what i like is that i can have completely different chapters and i can reference a different chapter section really easily when i'm using overleaf in terms of getting started with overleaf my recommendation would be to just start um it is free to use in terms of some of the features like adding multiple people to your documents i think in the free version you can add one person and then if you want to add multiple people you do have to get onto the pro version but a lot of universities will have free memberships and there's also a referral program where you can sort of earn a free membership so i do think it's pretty easy to use them mostly free and if you are not using this or some sort of latex based academic writing tool you need to start and it's one of those things i wish i had done so much earlier and i wish i had known about so much earlier because i wrote my entire master's thesis in a word document and the formatting was so annoying i can't understand how people can continue doing that in the higher levels of academia and why nobody really tells you about it so what really surprised me i think was that so many of you didn't know about it and hadn't used it before or might be feeling daunted so i hope that this was helpful and i really want to thank overly for sponsoring today's video and just for their product in general i've been using it as i said for three years now and it's made so the difference in terms of my academic writing thank you all for watching thanks to all of my wonderful members and i will see you all in the next video [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: PhD and Productivity

Views: 46,879

Keywords: phd student, phd and productivity, overleaf tutorial, latex overleaf tutorial, latex overleaf, how to write a research paper, research paper writing tips, thesis writing, academic writing, science writing, overleaf tutorial for research paper, overleaf tutorial thesis, latex reference tutorial overleaf, phd, phd thesis writing, phd advice, phd tips, overleaf

Id: 58CoXgze71Y

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022