Minimalist LaTeX Template for Academic Papers

This repository contains a LaTeX template to create an academic paper. The template carefully follows typographical best practices and has a minimalist design. The template is particularly well suited for research papers. It is designed so the papers are easy to scan and to read, both in print and on screen.

Documentation

The template is documented at https://pascalmichaillat.org/d2/.

Illustrations

• The paper produced by the template can be viewed at https://pascalmichaillat.org/d2.pdf.
• The online appendix produced by the template can be viewed at https://pascalmichaillat.org/d2a.pdf.

Usage

• Clone the repository to your local machine.
• Start editing the LaTeX file paper.tex to replace the boilerplate content with the content of your paper.
• Replace the figures in the PDF file figures.pdf with the figures that will be included in the paper. There should be one figure per page.
• Replace the references in the BibTeX file bibliography.bib with the references that will be included in the paper.
• Compile paper.tex with pdfTeX. This will generate a PDF file of your paper named paper.pdf.
• The LaTeX style file paper.sty collects all the commands to format the paper. The file must be included in the same folder as paper.tex. It can be modified to alter the paper’s format.
• The BibTeX style file bibliography.bst collects all the commands to format the bibliography. It must be included in the same folder as paper.tex. It can be modified to alter the bibliography’s format. This style file is based on econ.bst, which was created by Shiro Takeda and is available on GitHub.
• The file paper.pdf is not required to use the template. It only illustrate the output of the template. It will be overridden once paper.tex is compiled.

Online appendix

The repository also includes files to produce an online appendix—in case the paper’s appendix must be carved out into a separate, online appendix upon publication. An online appendix can be produced as follows:

• Start editing the LaTeX file appendix.tex to replace the boilerplate content with the content of your online appendix.
• The equation and section labels from paper.tex can be used in appendix.tex. This requires the following:
  • The file appendix.tex is in the same folder as paper.tex.
  • The file paper.tex is compiled first.
  • The auxiliary file paper.aux is available when appendix.tex is compiled.
• Compile appendix.tex with pdfTeX. This will generate a PDF file of your appendix named appendix.pdf.
• The LaTeX style file appendix.sty collects additional commands to format the online appendix. It must be included in the same folder as appendix.tex. It can be modified to alter the format of the online appendix. It works in conjunction with paper.sty, which must be included in the same folder.
• The file appendix.pdf is not required to use the template. It only illustrate the output of the template, and will be overridden once appendix.tex is compiled.

Submission to arXiv

The template is perfectly compatible with arXiv. A paper based on the template can be submitted to arXiv in just three steps once it has been compiled with pdfTeX:

1. Adjust the preamble of the source file paper.tex: on line 3, replace \bibliographystyle{bibliography} by \pdfoutput=1. The \bibliographystyle{bibliography} command is not needed because arXiv produces the bibliography directly from the paper.bbl file. The \pdfoutput=1 is required because the paper is compiled with pdfTeX.
2. Collect the required files into a folder. There should be four files: the source file paper.tex, the bibliography file paper.bbl, the style file paper.sty, and the figure file figures.pdf.
3. Zip the folder and upload the zipped file to arXiv.

The arXiv folder illustrates how the template should be prepared for submission to arXiv. The folder contains the four required files: paper.tex, paper.bbl, paper.sty, and figures.pdf. Furthermore, the preamble of paper.tex is adjusted appropriately. After being zipped, the folder could be uploaded to arXiv and would compile properly.

Software

The template was developed, tested, and validated on a Mac with the MacTeX-2023 distribution. Hopefully, it should also work on other machines and with other distributions.

License

The content of this repository is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

Real-world implementations

• Moen Meets Rotemberg: An Earthly Model of the Divine Coincidence (source code)
• Modeling the Displacement of Native Workers by Immigrants (source code)
• u* = √uv (source code)
• Critical Values Robust to P-hacking (source code)

Related resources

• LaTeX template for academic presentations – This template produces academic presentations following the same principles, and with a similar appearance, as this paper template.
• LaTeX commands to write math – These commands make it easy to write mathematical expressions. They can be used in combination with this paper template.