thesis latex reference

Overleaf for Scholarly Writing & Publication: LaTeX Theses and Dissertations

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

LaTeX Theses and Dissertatons

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

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Getting Started with Your Thesis or Dissertation

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.

How to Write your Thesis/Dissertation in LaTeX: A Five-Part Guide

Five-Part LaTeX Thesis/Dissertation  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

Link Your ORCID

Link yo ur  ORCiD  account  to your  Overleaf account  via the  ORCID @ CMU Portal

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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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Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Reference Managers and Overleaf

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

Resources for managing references with BibTeX and Overleaf. ​

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

Using EndNote with Overleaf

Export your bibliography from EndNote to Overleaf using the export to BibTeX option in EndNote.  Note:If you do not see the export to BibTeX option in EndNote, you may need to download and install the necessary EndNote style  plugin .

Guide from the University of Melbourne with a quick video on using EndNote with LaTeX

Using RefWorks with Overleaf

Export your bibliography from RefWorks in .bib format to use in Overleaf.

Save this exported file to a location which allows direct linking (e.g. google drive), to keep it in sync when you add new references.

Link your ORCiD ID

Link your ORCiD account to your Overleaf account.

Creating & Managing Bibliographies with BibTeX on Overleaf

LEARN HOW TO create and manage bibliographies using BibTeX on Overleaf by reading this article by Overleaf TeXpert , Lian Tze, that pulls together all the threads relating to citations, references and bibliographies, as well as how Overleaf and related tools can help you manage your references.

How to Include a Bibliography Using BibTeX

This is video #9 in a series of twenty one by  Dr Vincent Knight  of Cardiff University.

Link/sync with a Reference Manager

Using Mendeley with Overleaf

How to Link your Overleaf Account to Mendeley

I mport your Mendeley library into Overleaf

Managing shared references in your Mendeley groups

Mendeley blog post series on LaTeX and BibTeX

Using Zotero with Overleaf

• How to Link your Overleaf Account to Zotero
• Step-by-step guide from Caltech Library

Free Overleaf Webinar Series!

Overleaf is now offering  free webinars ! Topics and levels vary and more information can be found by visiting the

Overleaf Webinars page!

You will also find a number of recorded webinars for play on demand.

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• Last Updated: Aug 20, 2024 5:29 PM
• URL: https://overleaf.libguides.com/Thesis

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

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.

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.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

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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.

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How to cite a published phd dissertation in bibtex using @phdthesis.

I have the following entry. But when I cite it in my paper, I keep getting "Unpublished doctoral dissertation" showing up in the entry. As far as I can tell there's no field to specify publishing information, so how do I get rid of this message?

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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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Institute Name in @masterthesis Citations

I need to cite master thesis and the lecture notes into a document. But the problem with @masterthesis and @unpublished citations is they don't print an institution name in the pdflatex output of bibliography.

I get this bibliography output:

[1] Fris. Bike Model. XXX, 2016. [2] Koch. “Electrical Engineering Book”. Lecture Notes. 2015.

Any suggestions, how we can also print an institute name?

• 3 What kind of bibliography package do you use? Do you really use biblatex as your tagging suggests? Please consider adding an MWE so we can see how you are creating your bibliography, a solution may very well depend on your setup. In biblatex you'll have to use institution for the @thesis type, but school is still supported as an alias. –  moewe Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 11:21
• There is a , missing after bhgt –  samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 14:51

2 Answers 2

• Use @master s thesis (with an s after master ) instead of @masterthesis (which doesn’t exist and probably defaults to some other type), then school will appear.

The entry type @unpublished doesn’t support school , so I’d suggest using note instead, as is recommended in the biblatex documentation:

Use the fields howpublished and note to supply additional information in free format, if applicable.

You could also use the field addendum , which would appear at the very end.

It would probably be more proper and clean to redefine the output of @unpublished to include school / institution , but as a one-off solution, this should be fine.

Here’s the output:

As a side note: The official field names in biblatex are institution , not school ; and location , not address , but the latter ones do work as aliases.

• Thanks. It Works. @doncherry But all other bibliography entries are without " " and in italic form. Adding s in @masterthesis and note in @unpublished have made the text normal (instead of italic) and covered it with " " (it is also shown in the output you have posted). –  Yousaf Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 17:07
• Author names are in normal form but all titles are in italic form. –  Yousaf Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 17:16
• @ArslanYousaf @unpublished is quoted and upright in your MWE as well. You could change the type to @misc to get it in italics. @mastersthesis is indeed printed more like an @article than like a @book . You could add \DeclareFieldFormat[thesis]{title}{\mkbibemph{#1}} in the preamble to change that. –  doncherry Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 17:18

Quick and dirty, using bibtex together with natbib :

• Thanks. It has worked. But why do we need to write all text within "" ? @Denis –  Yousaf Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 14:43
• 1 @ArslanYousaf Either that or {Name}, . –  Johannes_B Commented Oct 18, 2016 at 14:45

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