reference thesis latex

Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home

• Using Templates on Overleaf
• Reference Managers and Overleaf
• Adding Tables, Images, and Graphs

Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX  here

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Collaboration tools

• One version of your project accessible to collaborators via a shared link or email invitation
• Easily select the level of access for collaborators (view, edit, or owner access)
• Real-time commenting speeds up the review process
• Tracked changes and full history view help to see contributions from collaborators
• Labels help to organize and compare different versions
• Chat in real time with collaborators right within the project

How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

You can upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos  if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

Add Institutional Library contact info here.

Contact Overleaf   or email [email protected]

5-part Guide on How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX

5-part LaTeX Thesis Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding  video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding  video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables   corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

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• Next: Using Templates on Overleaf >>
• Last Updated: May 18, 2021 1:57 PM
• URL: https://overleaf.libguides.com/Thesis

• Introduction to BibTex
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BibTex and LaTex: Cite References in LaTex

How to cite references in latex.

Insert the command below to where you want to cite in your LaTex document:

    \cite{BibTexKey}

If you want to create a bibliography of all references, use this command:

    \nocite{*}

How to Create Bibliography in LaTex

The following two commands are used to create bibliography/reference list:

\bibliographystyle{StyleType}

\bibliography{BibTexFileName}

The built-in bibliography styles in LaTex include:

• plain: references listed in alphabetical order and labeled numerically
• unsrt: same as plain except references appear in order of citation
• alpha: same as plain except labeled by entry
• abbrv: same as plain except use abbreviations for first names and journal names
• acm: ACM style
• ieeetr: IEEE style

How to Typeset a LaTex Document

Once you finish writing and citing in Latex, you need to run the following four commands to generate PDF file with bibliography:

Watch the video  on the right to find out how to cite, create bibliography, and typeset LaTex file in TexStudio.

A Sample LaTex File with Citations

In this simple LaTex document, five BibTex entries are cited. The bibliography style used is "plain", and the BibTex entries are from the database "Mybibtex".

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\title{About JabRef} \author{Author Name}

JabRef is an open source reference management software for BibTex \cite{BESIIICollaboration2014}. It has graphic interface, which makes it easy to use \cite{Apalkov2013,Libby2014}. This is why we choose it as our preferred reference management software for BibTex\cite{Silveira2014}. We will explain the features in details in this section \cite{Uematsu2015}.

\bibliographystyle{plain} \bibliography{Mybibtex}

\end{document}

Change Bibliography Style in LaTex

Sometimes, you need to change your bibliography styles in LaTex. This can be completed by changing the style name in the command:

\bibliographystyle{AnotherStyleType}

The video below gives more details on how to change a bibliography style in LaTex. Click the Full Screen button to enlarge the video.

Video: How to Typeset LaTex Document

This video shows you how to cite, create bibliography, and typeset LaTex file in TexStudio. Click the Full Screen button to enlarge the video.

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• Next: LaTex Resources >>
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because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

• graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
• subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
• minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
• nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
• listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
• babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
• fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
• hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
• And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

Share this:

16 comments.

8. June 2012 at 7:09

I would rather recommend a documentclass like memoir or scrreprt (from KOMA-Script), since they are much more flexible than report.

8. June 2012 at 8:12

I agree, my experience with them is limited though. Thanks for the addendum. Here is the documentation: memoir , scrreprt (KOMA script)

8. June 2012 at 8:02

Nice post Tom. I’m actually writing a two-part (or three) on Writing the PhD thesis: the tools . Feel free to comment, I hope to update it as I write my thesis, so any suggestions are welcome.

8. June 2012 at 8:05

Thanks for the link. I just saw your post and thought I should really check out git sometimes :-). Best, Tom.

8. June 2012 at 8:10

Yes, git is awesome. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options and commands, but if you’re just working alone, and probably on several machines, then you can do everything effortlessly with few commands.

11. June 2012 at 2:15

That’s what has kept me so far. But I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

8. June 2012 at 8:08

What a great overview. Thank you, this will come handy… when I finally get myself to start writing that thesis 🙂

8. June 2012 at 14:12

Thanks and good luck with your thesis! Tom.

9. June 2012 at 4:08

Hi, I can recommend two important packages: lineno.sty to insert linenumbers (really helpful in the debugging phase) and todonotes (allows you to insert todo-notes for things you still have to do.)

11. June 2012 at 0:48

Thanks Uwe! I wrote an article on both, lineno and todonotes . Here is the documentation: lineno and todonotes for more details.

12. June 2012 at 15:51

Thanks for the post, i’m currently writing my master thesis 🙂

A small note: it seems that subfig is deprecated for the subcaption package: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

12. June 2012 at 16:05

Hey, thanks for the tip. Too bad they don’t say anything in the documentation apart from the fact that the packages are not compatible.

1. August 2012 at 21:11

good thesis template can be also found here (free): http://enjobs.org/index.php/downloads2

including living headers, empty pages, two-sided with front and main matter as well as a complete structure

2. August 2012 at 11:03

Thanks for the link to the thesis template!

15. November 2012 at 22:21

Hi Tom, I’m writing a report on spanish in LaTex, using emacs, auctex, aspell (~170pags. ~70 files included by now) and this blog is my savior every time because I’m quite new with all these.

The question: Is there anyway (other than \- in every occurrence) to define the correct hyphenation for accented words (non english characters like é)? I have three o four accented words, about the subject of my report, that occur near 100 times each, across several files, and the \hyphenation{} command can’t handle these.

20. November 2012 at 3:47

I was wondering what packages you load in your preamble. For a better hyphenation (and easier typing), you should use these packages:

See here for more details.

If this doesn’t help, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

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LaTeX Resources for Graduate Students: Formatting of theses and dissertations

• BibTeX reference format
• BibTeX command
• LaTeX bibliography file
• LaTeX editors and compilers
• Sample LaTeX file with bibliography
• Sample LaTeX file without bibliography
• Formatting of theses and dissertations

Formatting and structure

The Cornell Graduate School has become increasingly flexible about the formatting of theses and dissertations.  There now are only seven core requirements . For the structure of theses and dissertations here is a list of required and recommended sections .

Latex template

Among the available thesis and dissertation templates provided by the Graduate School is also a LaTeX template (ZIP archive). This template has been uploaded to Overleaf and placed in the Cornell template directory . This template contains a small fix to avoid an error message about \ifpdf .

• << Previous: Sample LaTeX file without bibliography
• Last Updated: Oct 25, 2022 5:12 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/latex

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Frequently asked questions, 1. general use, 1.1 how can i use single-spacing, 2. bibliography and references.

2.1 My bibliography or list of references is missing. 2.2 How do I refer to a web page in a bibliographic reference? 2.3 How do I include a source in the bibliography, but not specifically reference it in the thesis?

3. Submitting to the Graduate School

3.1 How do I add my name to the short abstract for the dissertation? 3.2 How do I add typed signatures to the electronic copy?

4. Package information

4.1 What packages are not compatible with this class? 4.2 What does the hyperref package do? 4.3 What options should be used with the hyperref package?

You can use single-spacing with the \singlespace command. There is also a \doublespace command if needed to restore the default spacing. Note that single-spacing is only allowed in a few contexts. See the Graduate School documentation for details.

2.1 My bibliography or list of references is missing.

Run the script genbib.bat

2.2 How do I refer to a web page in a bibliographic reference?

Use the Electronic type in your references.bib file.

2.3 How do I include a source in the bibliography, but not specifically reference it in the thesis?

Use the \nocite{} command. This works the same as the \cite{} command, but will only include the reference in the bibliography, not in the list of references.

3.1 How do I add my name to the short abstract for the dissertation?

Use the command

at the top of your abstract.tex file.

3.2 How do I add typed signatures to the electronic copy?

Add the options electronic to the documentclass command, as in

then make sure the \signature{} and \deansignature{} statements are correct in the file thesis.tex .

4.1 What packages are not compatible with this class?

The only known incompatible package is chapterbib by Donald Arseneau. The reason for this incompatibility is that the support for references at the end of each chapter comes from inserting code from this package into appropriate places in the urithesis class file.

4.2 What does the hyperref package do?

When using pdflatex to create a pdf version of the thesis, the hyperref package will do the following:

• create a pdf table of contents in the pdf document
• all citations and references in the thesis will be hyperlinks that will go to the referenced equation, figure, bibliographic citation, etc…
• the table of contents in the thesis will be hyperlinks to the corresponding section in the thesis

4.3 What options should be used with the hyperref package?

• pdfborder={0 0 0} – this option makes the boxes that would appear around hyperlinks in the pdf document white, therefore they will be invisible
• plainpages=false – this option says to use the page numbers as they appear on the pages, instead of the Arabic equivalent. This will make the roman page numbers in the preliminary material have different numbers from the chapters of the thesis.
• pdfpagelabels – this option puts the page number as it appears on the page in the pdf file, therefore the first page of the first chapter will be page 1.

Guide to BibTeX Type PhdThesis

BibTeX is a reference management tool that is commonly used in LaTeX documents. The “phdthesis” BibTeX type is used for PhD dissertations or theses. In this guide, we will explain the required and optional fields for the “phdthesis” BibTeX type.

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Required Fields

The “phdthesis” BibTeX type requires the following fields:

• author : The author of the thesis.
• title : The title of the thesis.
• school : The name of the institution that awarded the degree.
• year : The year the degree was awarded.

Optional Fields

In addition to the required fields, the “phdthesis” BibTeX type also has a number of optional fields that can be used to provide additional information. These fields include:

• type : The type of the thesis, such as “PhD thesis” or “Master’s thesis”.
• address : The location of the institution.
• month : The month the thesis was submitted.
• note : Any additional information about the thesis.

Here is an example of how to use the “phdthesis” BibTeX type:

In this example, the BibTeX entry defines a PhD thesis authored by John Smith titled “An Analysis of Example”. The degree was awarded in 2022 by the University of Example, and the thesis was submitted in June in Example City, CA. The type of the thesis is specified as “PhD thesis”, and a note is included that provides a URL for the thesis.

BibTeX phdthesis template

The phdthesis entry type is intended to be used for a PhD thesis.

Minimal template

Minimal template with required fields only for a BibTeX phdthesis entry.

Full template

Full template including required and optional fields for a BibTeX phdthesis entry.

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• Biblatex citation styles
• 1 Introduction and example
• 2 Citation styles
• 3 Further reading

Introduction and example

Biblatex provides numerous citation styles but if no citation style is set L a T e X uses the one that matches the bibliography style . Here is a minimal example showing use of the biblatex parameter style=alphabetic to set the citation style to alphabetic .

 Open this example in Overleaf (the sample.bib file is created for you).

This example produces the following output:

Citation styles

Standard citation styles include:

• numeric Implements a numeric citation scheme intended for in-text citations. Should be employed in conjunction with the numeric bibliography style .
• numeric-comp Compact variant of the numeric mode. Citations like [1, 2, 3] are replaced by [1-3] .
• numeric-verb Verbose variant of the numeric style. Instead of [2, 5, 7] will print [2];[5];[7] .
• alphabetic Alphabetic citation scheme similar to the standard alpha in style bibtex . To be used in conjunction with the alphabetic bibliography style.
• alphabetic-verb Verbose version of the alphabetic style. Instead of [Doe98, Doe95, Farn2004] will print [Doe98];[Doe95];[Farn2004] .
• authoryear Implements the author-year citation scheme. To be used in conjunction with the author-year bibliography style.
• authoryear-comp Compact variant of the authoryear style. Prints the author only once if subsequent references passed to a single citation command share the same author. Prints Doe 1992, 1995 instead of Doe 1992, Doe 1995 .
• authoryear-ibid A variant of the authoryear intended for footnote citations. Replaces repeated citations by the abbreviation ibidem .
• authoryear-icomp A style combining the features of authoryear-comp and authoryear-ibid
• authortitle Implements the author-title scheme. Intended for citations given in footnotes.
• authortitle-comp Compact variant of authortitle . Instead of Doe, First title; Doe, Second title this will print Doe, First title, Second title .
• authortitle-ibid A variant of the authortitle intended for footnote citations. Replaces repeated citations by the abbreviation ibidem .
• authortitle-icomp A style combining authortitle-comp and authortitle-ibid .
• authortitle-terse Variant of authoritle that only prints the title if the bibliography contains more than one work of the respective author/editor.
• authortitle-tcomp Style combining authortitle-terse and authortitle-comp .
• authortitle-ticomp Style combining authortitle-icomp and authortitle-terse .
• verbose Citation style that prints a full citation when the entry is cited for the first time and a short version afterwards.
• reading Citation style that goes with the bibliography style by the same name. Loads the authortitle style.

There are other non-standard citation styles popular in different journals and thesis

• American Chemical Society (ACS) style
• American Institute of Physics (AIP) style
• American Mathematical Society (AMS) style
• Vancouver system
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) style
• Nature style
• Science style
• Chicago Style
• Harvard referencing style
• American Psychological Association (APA) style

(*) this is a new style, see http://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-phys

Further reading

For more information see

• Bibliography management in LaTeX
• Biblatex bibliography styles
• Biblatex package documentation
• Table of contents
• Management in a large project
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
• Copying a project
• Creating a project from a template
• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
• Working offline in Overleaf
• Using Track Changes in Overleaf
• Using bibliographies in Overleaf
• Sharing your work with others
• Using the History feature
• Debugging Compilation timeout errors
• How-to guides
• Guide to Overleaf’s premium features

LaTeX Basics

• Creating your first LaTeX document
• Choosing a LaTeX Compiler
• Paragraphs and new lines
• Bold, italics and underlining

Mathematics

• Mathematical expressions
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Brackets and Parentheses
• Fractions and Binomials
• Aligning equations
• Spacing in math mode
• Integrals, sums and limits
• Display style in math mode
• List of Greek letters and math symbols
• Mathematical fonts
• Using the Symbol Palette in Overleaf

Figures and tables

• Inserting Images
• Positioning Images and Tables
• Lists of Tables and Figures
• Drawing Diagrams Directly in LaTeX
• TikZ package

References and Citations

• Bibliography management with bibtex
• Bibliography management with natbib
• Bibliography management with biblatex
• Bibtex bibliography styles
• Natbib bibliography styles
• Natbib citation styles
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using polyglossia and fontspec
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec
• International language support
• Quotations and quotation marks

Document structure

• Sections and chapters
• Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
• Nomenclatures
• Multi-file LaTeX projects
• Lengths in L a T e X
• Headers and footers
• Page numbering
• Paragraph formatting
• Line breaks and blank spaces
• Text alignment
• Page size and margins
• Single sided and double sided documents
• Multiple columns
• Code listing
• Code Highlighting with minted
• Using colours in LaTeX
• Margin notes
• Font sizes, families, and styles
• Font typefaces
• Supporting modern fonts with X Ǝ L a T e X

Presentations

• Environments

Field specific

• Theorems and proofs
• Chemistry formulae
• Feynman diagrams
• Molecular orbital diagrams
• Chess notation
• Knitting patterns
• CircuiTikz package
• Pgfplots package
• Typesetting exams in LaTeX
• Attribute Value Matrices

Class files

• Understanding packages and class files
• List of packages and class files
• Writing your own package
• Writing your own class

Advanced TeX/LaTeX

• In-depth technical articles on TeX/LaTeX

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