Writing and LaTeX

Academic writing

Skills
Phrasebank

Styleguide - from the Guardian

TeX - Donald Knuth's typesetting system (1978)

TUG - Tex Users Group
Texample- examples

LaTeX - a document preparation system

LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language

LaTeX project

latex-project.org
latex-project.org - documentation
TeX FAQ

CTAN package list - Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, the authoritative place for TeX related material and software for download. Repositories for other projects, such as the MiKTeX distribution of TeX, constantly mirror most of CTAN.

LaTeX distributions

TeX Live

TeX Live distribution (Linux and Windows) - install via OS (e.g. Synaptics) or via tlmgr

TeX Live documentation

TeX Live way 1 OS

TUG TeX Live Debian info 'way 1'
Wiki Debian Latex 'way 1'

Debian packages

Debian TeX Live base package

TeX Live way 2 tlmgr

TeX Live tlmgr 'way 2' - own package manager if not using OS package manager

Miktex

Miktex distribution for Windows - comes with the mpm package manager

LaTeX editors and utilities

Texmaker - cross-platform LaTeX editor for linux, macosx and windows
Texmaker - Wikipedia

TeXworks editor

Pandoc - swiss army knife for format conversion

LaTeX tips

Referencing

There are two methods for adding bibliography at the end of your LATEX documents.

The first method is to use thebibliography environment inside your document. Reference entries are added using \bibitem{key} and are called via \cite{key}. You can change the bibliography style by formatting the \bibitem entry.
The second method is BibTEX, in which case you need two files: bibliography style file (bstfile) and bibliography database file (bibfile). In your LATEX source file, you have to add the following two lines for bibliography:
- \bibliographystyle{unsrt} % Bibliography style file, unsrt.bst
- \bibliography{moga} % Bibliography database file, moga.bib
When you execute bibtex, the bibfile is formatted in accordance with the rules in the bstfile. The resulting file is a bbl file that is referenced by your LATEX sourcefile.

BibTeX basics

Basics

BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. It was created by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985. It is written in WEB/Pascal.

BibTeX intro at Wikipedia
BibTeX.org

BibTeX.com - by Paperpile (commercial)
BibTeX entries - @manual, etc

Styles

Two main styles:

Numbered citations (also known as the Vancouver referencing system) are numbered consecutively in order of appearance in the text
Textual citations (also known as the Harvard referencing system) use the author surname and (usually) the year as the abbreviated form of the citation

Bibtex styles: abbr, acm, alpha, apalike, plain, unsrt, ... RHUL thesis uses abbr

Vancouver-style (wikipedia) - numbers
Vancouver-style package

Harvard-style (wikipedia) - parental referencing
Harvard-style: author-year style (all but the first author are suppressed in second and subsequent citations of the same entry); the package defines several variant styles

BibTeX tools

Beamer

Beamer is a LaTeX document class for creating presentation slides.

Beamer - Wikipedia
Beamer homepage - Joseph Wright

Alternatives

Clarivate, the WOS company has a commercial product called EndNote. You need a license to use it.

Citations and repositories

DBLP - University of Trier - Computer Science Library - bibtex

arXiv.org - general purpose publishing site
orcid.org - unique identifier for publication
CEUR-WS.org - repository including of STIDS
DOI - Digital Object Identifiers - ISO 26324, Digital Object Identifier System - a DOI is a registered URI

Science Citation Index - SCI - integrated into Thomson Reuters IP services - covers about 4700 science journals, data back to 1970, abstracts from 1991 onwards
Web Of Knowledge - WOK - confusingly also referred to as Web Of Science - who gets quoted by who ...
Web Of Knowledge - subscription access

Graphics

TikZ intro at Wikipedia
TikZ at texample