How to write an academic paper using Overleaf
During the course of our academic life and beyond, we are sometimes given the task of writing a research/academic paper as part of an assignment or as an aftermath of a research work. While Microsoft Word is an overwhelming choice for most students, Overleaf provides a simple yet elegant and efficient way to write research papers. Today, through this article, I will be going through some basics of Overleaf and how to you can write your own research paper using Overlear. Please note that this article should not be used as the only source of learning and I recommend studying official Overleaf documentations and Youtube tutorials to get a better understanding.
Overleaf documentation: https://www.overleaf.com/learn
IMPORTANT NOTE: Examples and images used in this article are taken from my own published research paper, so please do not reuse or copy any content as it will be a breach of copyright laws and might get you in trouble with plagiarism.
FORMAT
There are a couple of things to decide before starting to write. First, what format should you use. Most research papers follow the IEEE double column format or ACM format or Single column format. See the images to get a better understanding.
Source: https://www.latextemplates.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/sample-acmsmall.jpg
To save you from the trouble of designing your own double or single column template, IEEE/ACM templates are available in Overleaf. What this means is that, you can simply open those templates in your Overleaf account and edit them as you like and Overleaf will automatically generate a document in the single or double column format. I will be attaching the links to the templates below.
IEEE Conference template (double column): https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/ieee-conference-template/grfzhhncsfqn
ACM Single Column template: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-large-1-column-format-template/fsyrjmfzcwyy
Some more templates: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/ieee
Opening Your Own Project
Each paper in Overleaf is termed as “Project”. Under each project you can write your paper. Go to overleaf.com and sign up with your email to open an account. Once you are done creating your account, go to overleaf.com/project. This is where you can find all your projects under one umbrella. If you look to the top left of your screen, you can see a button called “New Project”. If you click it, it will display various templates like resume, thesis, assignment etc.
You should click the options based on your purpose. For now, click “Blank Project”. It will ask you to enter the name of the project, so enter a name. Let’s say, “CS101 Research Paper”. This is what your screen will look like next.
On the left hand side we have notebook, where we will right our contents. On the right hand side, we have the generated PDF based on what we write. You can see on the right hand side we already have our title, author and intro based on our input on the left. “main.tex” is the file we are currently writing on. Above “main.tex” you will also see an option called “blank file”, which can be used to create more .tex files. Everything you write must be within \begin{document} and \end{document}. Anything you write outside will not be included in the generated pdf file. In our paper, we have various sections right? Introduction, Related Studies, Results etc. All of these sections can be created using \section command. We already have a section called Introduction as shown in the image above. You can create more sections like \section{Related Studies} and they will be included in the pdf. Everytime you make a change on the left notebook and want to see how your change looks like, you can click on “Recompile” on the right and the changes will be reflected in the pdf. Sections can have subsections and subsections can have subsubsections. These depend on how you are writing your research paper. A bit confused? No worries. I will give you some examples to clear it up.
If you look at this image, we have section called Preliminaries, where we want to discuss some background information about our research. So we created some subsections like “Traditional Security Metrics”, “5G Architecture” etc under the section “Preliminaries”. The purpose of creating subsections is to divide the information into groups, so that the reader can better understand what we are talking about. If you write huge huge paragraphs under one single section, readers might get confused and might lose the flow. Subsections allow us to better organize our paper content. Subsections can then be further divided into subsubsections to further divide the information. If you look at Figure 6, we divided the subsection “5G Architecture” into further subsubsections called “Network Slicing” and “Network Function Virtualization”. This allows us to organize our contents much better and readers can catch up with the flow. We can create subsections and subsubsections in the same way we created sections. Remember the command for creating sections? it was \sections{}.
So we have a section called Preliminaries and then subsections and then subsubsections. So we write the commands:
\section{Preliminaries}
*section text goes here*
\subsection{Traditional Security Metrics}
*subsection text goes here*
\subsection{5G Architecture}
*subsection text goes here*
\subsubsection{Network Slicing}
\section{New Section}
Try this out on your project and see if you can create your own sections and subsections.
This is your intro to how to create a new project/paper in Overleaf and how to create section subsections. Now let’s make things easier, shall we? Remember I told you that instead of creating our own project/template, we can simply reuse the IEEE/ACM template to write our paper. Click on the IEEE template link I gave above, and you will see an option called “Open as Template”. Click on that and you will be taken to a new window.
This is the template for IEEE conference research papers. You can also use ACM single column format or any other format depending on your need. All templates are available in overleaf and you can google to find them. If you study the IEEE template and then match with the pdf on the right, you will get a pretty good idea on how the commands works and how to write your own stuff.
NOTE: This article will be periodically updated to include more content.