Writing papers using Latex – Part 2

After you have gone through the gruesome as well as the exciting task of completing your experiments and getting somewhat positive results for your research publication(maybe even your first). The next step is to prepare it for paper submission at a conference or journal.

By now, you should have a working Latex environment and the Latex template folder.

By the end of this article…

We will know about the complete set of file types that you will generally encounter while working with the author submission kit from the respective conference or workshop venue.

For example, the author’s submission instructions for IJCAI 2022 conference to be held in Vienna, Austria is available here.

In Part 1, we covered how we should be ready with the rough first draft of our paper and then how to set up your Latex environment. Now, in Part 2, we will discuss a straightforward manner of converting from Word to the Latex template.

Different file types you encounter while writing papers

.tex file – You will have to edit this file. Initially, it will contain instructions for authors regarding how to write the paper.

.bst file – You do not need to edit this file. This helps set the bibliographic style of the paper or in other words, the formatting of your “References” section. This is usually given as part of the author submission template that is made available for every such submission venue. In the above “.tex” file, at the end of your Latex file, but before the \end{document} statement, we add the following line :

[code] \bibliographystyle{splncs04} [/code]

Given that “splncs04.bst” is the name of the bibliographic file for our purpose.

.cls file – This file is called for setting documentclass of your Latex file. I will recommend that you do not edit the file until the very end. However, for the submission of your paper for review at any conference or workshop, if you want to fit your material within the page limit, you can tweak various components of this “.cls” file and reduce the amount of content.

.sty file(optional) – It contains specific formatting instructions for the template. It is either mentioned at the beginning of the .tex file just before \begin{document} or as a separate .sty file.

.bib file – This is a BibTex file that will contain all your references in BibTex format. I have covered how to get BibTex formats for each reference and other related concepts in another article.

During the course of writing your paper, you will only need to access the .tex file for writing the body or content of the paper and the .bib file for adding the references. Now, I will tell you the basics you need to know while writing the body of the paper.

General instructions

The .tex file in the author’s template or submission guidelines always comes pre-filled with content, usual instructions for the authors, and guidelines for using Latex and any other instructions pertaining to the particular paper template (Example: Springer’s llcns and ACM’s sigconf).

Please find well-documented files for each at my Github repo.

Therefore…

I hope you are now better acquainted with the “author’s template” of a conference or journal paper submission.

What is your take on this topic?