Writing Research paper with LaTex

 

Editing and formatting research findings for a paper is a challenging task. Scientific presentation skill of a researcher matters in writing a research paper.  In scientific document editing tasks, LaTeX comes as a handy tool.  It offers a wide range of solutions to researchers with respect to editing and formatting.

LaTeX is extensively used in academic the world for the publication of scientific findings in disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics, etc. In fact, the majority of standard journals and conferences demand the documents be submitted in the LaTeX template of their own.

LaTeX is a highly preferred tool for scientific writing due to the following reasons.

·     Dealing with mathematical notation: Latex produces professional quality equations, equations in LaTeX are easier to edit compared to any WYSIWYG editors (for example MS word)

·    Consistent handling of intra-document references and bibliography: LaTeX brings its immense power in scientific reference generation. It is highly loved and adopted in this perspective. It automatically manages references and the formatting of references in the document.

·      Separation of content and style: LaTeX follows different philosophy than the traditional MS word editing paradigm. LaTeX separates the presentation from the content. This way of editing style is similar to Cascading Style Sheets in Styling the HTML Documents.

·     LaTeX is open-source many generations of scientists have written the extensions they needed. You will be able to find all common and most rarely used features.

·      Tables and illustrations: Tables generated using latex code look professional.  It can be customized to the extent required by the researcher.  There is wide documentation is available for generating the different table styles.  Illustrations used in latex can be generated using .eps format. It is usually using distortion-free images. Irrespective of the zoom level of the document, images added in the document remain undistorted.

The value of features offered by LaTeX becomes apparent when someone edits a document of several pages such as Thesis - which involves multiple equations, at least 10+ citations, 20+ figures, and figure references. Choosing LaTeX for typesetting over the traditional typesetting tools is a wise and time-saving move. In this aspect, for an engineering student/faculty learning to typeset scientific documents using LaTeX is an important skill set to learn and understand. 

This blog post will be followed by a series of continued blog posts, where the readers will be introduced to step by step information about how one can typeset the document using LaTex by covering various aspects.

In this regard NITTE Meenakshi Institute of Technology, which is considered as one of the best engineering colleges in Bangalore encourages students and faculty members to use this tool for writing more and more scientific research papers.

By Dr. Manoj Kumar MV, Associate Professor, Information Science Department, NMIT, Bangalore.