latex thesis

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.

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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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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.

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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

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LaTeX templates for writing a thesis

Aside from CTAN, what are good resources/repositories for Latex templates? In particular, I'm looking for some pretty Thesis templates (I'm familiar with classicthesis)

• repositories
• Should this be for thesis templates, or for templates in general? So far, your answers have all been thesis templates. I'm looking for other templates. Please either edit the question to read "Resources/Sites for thesis templates", or clarify that you want general templates. (Or, simply delete your parenthetical note.) –  Kevin Vermeer Commented Jul 29, 2010 at 19:51
• I think 'templates in general' might be too broad. As it is, 'thesis templates' is quite a wide topic. –  Joseph Wright ♦ Commented Jul 30, 2010 at 5:43

17 Answers 17

In my case, I actually found it easiest to roll my own using the memoir package as a base. It's very well documented, and setting the appropriate margins, double/one-half line spacing, etc. was very easy. And it makes it easy to play around a bit within the thesis guidelines, for instance making fancy chapter headings.

• 1 Although it uses the book class, Siarhei Khirevich's tips might be inspiring to customize headers, chose a font, parametrize microtype, hacking bibtex, etc. –  Clément Commented Jun 12, 2014 at 16:33

Robert Poser has created a site dedicated to thesis templates:

http://www.thesis-template.com/

The link is currently dead, but that web site can still be read using archive.org (the Internet wayback machine) choosing a snapshot date such as February 8, 2014 . The thesis template site mostly just links to available external sites with templates.

It provides links to ready-to-go thesis templates of various universities worldwide. There's even a google map for viewing the templates origins on the world map.

Besides LaTeX templates there are also LyX thesis templates.

UK-TUG have a list of thesis templates from various UK institutions at http://uk.tug.org/training/thesis/ . There is also a good generic template at http://www.sunilpatel.co.uk/thesistemplate.php , but I'm note sure any of these are 'pretty'. At least in the UK the requirements tend to be vary much geared around a traditional manuscript style (double spaced and so on).

• Note (Jan 2014): many of the links from the above age are dead now. –  Chris H Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:44
• @ChrisH I will see what I can do about that: we don't unfortunately get much direct information on this so have to rely on what we find! –  Joseph Wright ♦ Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 12:08
• The link to "Using LaTeX to Write a PhD Thesis" is now dickimaw-books.com/latex/thesis (sys.uea.ac.uk was changed to cmp.uea.ac.uk many years ago, if anyone finds any old links to it, although I've moved most of my LaTeX resources from cmp.uea.ac.uk to dickimaw-books.com.) –  Nicola Talbot Commented Jun 12, 2014 at 16:31

I'm currently writing a (bachelor) thesis myself and just using the LaTeX's own "report" class, I find it meets all of my universities requirements when I only use a custom title page.

• 3 I used scrreprt and I didn't even have to modify the title page. –  marczellm Commented Jan 6, 2015 at 15:28

For the spanish speaking community, I maintain a thesis format which can be easily adapted to the requirements of different universities. The format itself can be used to write thesis documents in any language, but it has a spanish option which takes care of loading a suitable set of packages and options to get the entire format consistently translated into spanish.

There is an unofficial class sapthesis for the Laurea, Laurea Specialistica and Dottorato degrees at the La Sapienza university of Rome.

Chances are, your institution will have pretty strict specifications for your thesis format. If you're lucky your institution may have a class file or some grad students may maintain a unofficial template.

Purdue University (a state school in Indiana, USA) has a document class that may be a good starting point.

https://engineering.purdue.edu/~mark/puthesis/

An additional complication at Purdue is that each department has additional constraints on the formatting so the document class takes an option to specify the department.

• 5 “ Chances are, your institution will have pretty strict specifications” – is this actually common? My University has absolutely zero specs. I’m the author, I decide the format. –  Konrad Rudolph Commented Aug 5, 2010 at 9:34
• 8 In U.S. institutions it's the absolute norm, not the exception. And the formatting guidelines are usually awful as well. –  Alan Munn Commented Jan 10, 2011 at 1:09
• 6 @Konrad: When Alan says "awful," he really means awful . They're atrocious. –  TH. Commented Jan 10, 2011 at 1:57
• 1 In German institutions it's the absolute exception, not the norm. Only things like the exact words to be used for the declaration about having written the thesis oneself, marked quotations, named all sources and so on as well as some rules about the title page, inclusion of CV and such things are regulated. –  Stephen Commented Sep 26, 2011 at 7:11

There seems to be a nice compilation of thesis templates on this site:

https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/thesis/

These templates include many already mentioned here.

A really great place for LaTeX templates is:

http://www.latextemplates.com

This website is beautifully laid out and the templates are sorted into categories that make it easy to find the template that is best suited to your purposes. All of the templates have PDF examples and full template code.

I am not affiliated with this website in any way but have used it many times.

I use tex live utility on the mac to maintain my tex distribution. Specifically I use the ctan repository. On searching for thesis templates, I got style (cls) files for the following thesis formats. More information can be found on their respective ctan pages.

afthesis, classicthesis, ebsthesis, gatech-thesis, hepthesis, muthesis, psu-thesis, ryethesis, seuthesis, thuthesis, ucdavisthesis, ucthesis, uiucthesis, umich-thesis, umthesis, ut-thesis, uwthesis, york-thesis

My suggestion would be to see which one of these is closest to your university's requirements and then build on that. To search for each of the above theses files, use the following link format: http://www.ctan.org/cgi-bin/filenameSearch.py?filename=afthesis&Search=Search and replace the name appropriately and on the page visit the readme page for more details.

Unofficial (but linked from the Graduate School webpages) thesis template for Tennessee Tech University .

At the moment, the development snapshot is more advanced (automatic generation of front matter pages, ToC and related list page headers), and is nearly ready to be merged back to the stable version. Only 13 commands required for generating a basic thesis (plus any \include commands for your chapters and appendices).

Based off memoir, with hyperref, hypcap, ifthen, indentfirst, listings, memhfixc, nomencl, refcount, rotating, and ted packages required.

I just redid the uclathesis class, and in the process collected (iirc without checking) about a dozen thesis classes from various schools in the US and Europe to look at how others did this or that. In the end I used memoir, and it was pretty simple and straightforward, all in all. The part that took the longest (a day?) was the construction of the frontmatter pages (titlepage, signature page, copyright, vita, dedication, acknowledgements, abstract) which all had to have a special format.

I could email you any or all of these, and, even tho I'm probably not in the same class as many of the latex coders here, I'd be happy to advise you if you need it, since this is an exercise that I just finished.

Illinois Institute of Technology has their thesis class at available from the Graduate College website . A lot of the commands are somewhat nonstandard (for example capitalized \Section commands), so I've been redoing the class file as I work on my thesis. I'll post the result somewhere when the thesis examiner likes it.

The Université de Lorraine (in France), and more specifically the LORIA lab, developped a template that can be easily adapted.

You may find it at http://www.loria.fr/~roegel/TeX/TUL.html , but this page as well as the documentation is in French.

8< = = = = = = = = = = =

Another template was developped by the "association des doctorants de l'IRISA et de l'École doctorale Matisse en informatique, traitement du signal et électronique", a french team.

You may find it at http://www.irisa.fr/adoc/WikiWeb/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ModeleLatex

http://github.com/AndreyAkinshin/Russian-Phd-LaTeX-Dissertation-Template

Russian PhD thesis (Candidate of Sciences dissertation) template compatible with national standard (GOST).

NOVAthesis is an active and full featured LaTeX thesis template, designed to be easily accessible to LaTeX beginners. It will do all you need except writing the thesis for you!

The template is multilingual and easily costumizable. It has considerable large user communities at Facebook (use PT or EN) and GitHub (use EN only). There is also a new blog (in PT) about LaTeX and with tips on how to use and configure the novathesis template.

Give it a try… you won't regret! :)

• The NOVAthesis template is now an official template at Overleaf , making it trivial to experiment with it. –  João Lourenço Commented Feb 27, 2019 at 3:01

I really like and highly recommend the LaTeX Thesis Template from Matthias Pospiech. It's so huge, it's actually more like a framework, comes with it's own 272 page documentation and is constantly being revised with it's current version from 2018-09-20, compilable with the current TeXlive 2018.

target users This template was developed with all sorts of structured documents in mind that require a good citation and reference framework with a customizable layout. It has so far been used for bachelor, master and phd-thesis as well as the thesis of teachers in their practical year. These theses had all a natural science background, which means that also this template is optimized for the needs of people in natural sciences. Nevertheless it should be easily adaptable to topics in humanities, linguistics or even arts. This template has been used under the supervision of the maintainer by very early beginners and also advanced LaTeX users. The experience was that beginners as well as advanced users are more productive with it because ‘it just works’, while the more advanced users additionally know that they can find all options for later modifications because of the documentation in the code.

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• LaTeX Thesis
• Graduate Academic Affairs

LaTeX is a powerful tool for document creation, especially for documents including extensive mathematical notation. 

LaTeX Downloads

• Sample thesis
• Figure Help
• Bibliography Help
• Thesis document class file

Try MATLAB software (for numerical computation, visualization, and programming)

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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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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 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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A LaTeX template for academic monographs (e.g., dissertations and thesis). This template serves both beginners and proficient LaTeX users.

joaomlourenco/novathesis

Folders and files.

Repository files navigation

Table of Contents

With a local latex installation, with a remote cloud-based service, problems and difficulties, suggestions, bugs and feature requests, word templates.

If you choose to use this project, please:

• Give it a star by clicking the (⭐️) at the top right of the project's page .
• Make a small donation ( pay me a beer! )
• Cite the NOVAthesis manual in your thesis/dissertation (e.g., in the acknowledgments) with \cite{novathesis-manual} (the correct bibliographic reference will be added automatically).

The “ novathesis ” LaTeX template is an Open Source project for writing thesis, dissertations, and other monograph-like documents, which…

• Just select the School, provide the cover info, your chapters with text… and you're done!
• It's LaTeX! What would you expect?! 😉
• E.g., multiple chapter styles, multiple font styles, automatic book spine generation, …
• Currently supports +20 Schools, drawing the covers and typesetting the text according to the rules of each School.

This work is licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License v1.3c. To view a copy of this license, visit the LaTeX project public license .

Getting Started

See below for alternatives to a local LaTeX installation

See “ minimal installation ” for instructions on how to build/use a minimal installation of LaTeX (<100 MB vs. 5GB for tex-live), which is just enough to compile the template successfully

• Windows: install TeX-Live or MikTeX .
• Linux: install TeX-Live or MikTeX .
• macOS: install MacTeX (a macOS version of TeX-Live ) or MikTeX .
• Cloning the GitHub repository with git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/joaomlourenco/novathesis.git ; or
• Downloading the latest version from the GitHub repository as a Zip file
• The main file is named “ template.tex ”.
• Either load it in your favorite LaTeX text editor or compile it in the terminal with latexmk -shell-escape -file-line-error -pdf template . If you use a LaTeX text editor, please notice that the NOVAthesis template uses biber and not bibtex to process the bibliography, which means that most probably you have to open the Editor Preferences and somewhere (depends on the Editor) change bibtex to biber .
• If Murphy is elsewhere, LaTeX will create the file “ template.pdf ”, which you may open with your favorite PDF viewer.
• Edit the files in the “ Config ” folder:

• See 3. above.
• You're done with a beautifully formatted thesis/dissertation! 😃

See above for using a local installation of LaTeX

NOVAthesis v6.10.10 is available as an Overleaf template . Just select open as template and follow from step 3 above !

• Download the latest version from the GitHub repository as a Zip file .
• Login to your favorite LaTeX cloud service. I recommend Overleaf but there are alternatives (these instructions apply to Overleaf and you'll have to adapt for other providers).
• In the menu select New project -> Upload project
• Upload the zip with all the "novathesis" files.
• Select “ template.tex ” as the main file.
• Follow from step 3 above

• Install LaTeX in your computer and use the template locally !
• Opt for a hassle-free solution and buy a (student) plan in Overleaf .

Getting Help

Check the wiki and have some hope! 😄

If you couldn't find what you were looking for, ask for help in:

• The GitHub Discussions page (only EN please) at https://github.com/joaomlourenco/novathesis/discussions .
• The Facebook page (PT or EN) at https://www.facebook.com/groups/novathesis .
• The Reddit novathesis community at r/novathesis .
• You may also give a look at the novathesis blog at https://novathesis.blogspot.pt .

Please don't try to contact me directly for questions or support, by email or any other channel! I will not answer such requests… The GitHub Discussions page and the Facebook page are the right places to ask for help and support!

• Do you have a suggestion? Please add it to the wiki and help other users!
• Did you find a bug? Please open an issue . Thanks!
• Would you like to request a new feature (or support of a new School)? Please open an issue . Thanks!

List of Supported Schools

NOVA University Lisbon

• NOVA School for Science and Technology (FCT-NOVA)
• PhD in Information Management
• Master in Geographical Information Systems and Science
• Master in Statistics and Information Management
• Master in Information Management
• Master in Geospatial Technologies
• Master in Data Science and Advanced Analytics
• Masters in Geospatial Technologies
• National School of Public Heath (ENSP-NOVA)
• Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCSH-NOVA)
• Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biologica Antonio Xavier (ITQB-NOVA)

University of Lisbon

• Instituto Superior Técnico (IST-ULISBOA)
• Faculdade de Ciências (FC-ULISBOA)
• Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária (FMV-ULISBOA)

University of Minho

• Escola de Arquitetura (EA-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Ciências (EC-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Direito (ED-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Economia e Gestão (EEG-UMIMHO)
• Escolha de Engenharia (EE-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Medicina (EM-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Psicologia (EP-UMIMHO)
• Escola Superior de Enfermagem (ESE-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Educação (IE-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas (ILCH-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Investigação em Biomateriais, Biodegradáveis e Biomiméticos (I3Bs-UMIMHO)

Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias

Departamento de Engenharia Informática e Sistemas de Informação (ULHT-DEISI)

• Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Barreiro (ESTB-IPS)

Other Schools/Degrees

• Escola Superior de Enfermagem do Porto (ESEP)

Although the template goes far beyond the cover… some covers from the supported schools are is display below.

These are not official templates for FCT-NOVA nor any other School, although we have done our best to make it fully compliant to each School regulations for thesis/dissertation presentation.

All contributors , both sporadic and regular, are welcome. :) Please contact me to join the team.

If you are here looking for the (deprecated) Word templates (not maintained anymore), please go to this other repository .

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The MIT thesis template in LaTeX

The latex template.

The current MIT thesis template was developed in 2023, using up-to-date LaTeX coding, to meet the current formatting requirements of the MIT Libraries. The title and abstract pages are automatically laid out from information provided by the user. This template includes options to use a variety of fonts, and it is compatible with either pdfTeX or unicode engines such as luaLaTeX. When using LaTeX formats dated November 2022 or later, the resulting pdf file meets the PDF/A-2b archivability standard. A standard TeX Live installation includes all other packages required by the template.

• Download The most current LaTeX files for this template are distributed through the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN): https://ctan.org/pkg/mitthesis
• Documentation Documentation for the template in pdf format Documentation: here . -->
• Gallery of fonts Sample theses in the font sets defined by the template. Gallery of fonts: here . -->
• Sample title pages Sample title pages for various combinations of authors and degrees. Sample title pages: are here . -->
• Overleaf The template is also in Overleaf.com's template gallery. Overleaf.com: , here .--> Learn more about Overleaf at MIT .

This template was written by John Lienhard at the request of the MIT Libraries.

Specifications for MIT theses

The formatting requirements for MIT theses are set by the MIT Libraries, as described at this url: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/thesis-specs/ . Questions regarding these specifications should be directed to [email protected] .

The original LaTeX 2.09 template was written by Stephen Gildea in the late 1980s (also in CTAN, here ). That template was edited by many later students, leading to the files archived here.

LaTeX has changed greatly since the original MIT thesis template was written. LaTeX 2.09 was replaced by LaTeX2e in 1994. New engines were developed, particularly pdfTeX during the 1990s and Unicode-aware engines in the decades that followed. Many packages and fonts were developed to accompany the original platform, particularly after 2000; and major updates to the LaTeX kernel began in 2018. Over the years, the MIT Libraries have changed the required format several times, especially as electronic thesis submission has become the norm. The original template served MIT well; but by the early 2020s, it was substantially out of date. That situation motivated the creation of this new template.

A LaTeX template for thesis, dissertations and similar monograph-like documents

View the Project on GitHub joaomlourenco/novathesis

• Download ZIP File
• Download TAR Ball
• View On GitHub

With a Local LaTeX Installation

With a remote cloud-based service, problems and difficulties, suggestions, bugs and feature requests, word templates.

If you choose to use this project, please:

• Give it a star by clicking the (⭐️) at the top right of the project’s page .
• Make a small donation ( pay me a beer! )
• Cite the NOVAthesis manual in your thesis/dissertation (e.g., in the acknowledgments) with \cite{novathesis-manual} (the correct bibliographic reference will be added automatically).

The “ novathesis ” LaTeX template is an Open Source project for writing thesis, dissertations, and other monograph-like documents, which…

• Just select the School, provide the cover info, your chapters with text… and you’re done!
• It’s LaTeX! What would you expect?! 😉
• E.g., multiple chapter styles, multiple font styles, automatic book spine generation, …
• Currently supports +20 Schools, drawing the covers and typesetting the text according to the rules of each School.

This work is licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License v1.3c. To view a copy of this license, visit the LaTeX project public license .

Getting Started

See below for alternatives to a local LaTeX installation

See “ minimal installation ” for instructions on how to build/use a minimal installation of LaTeX (<100 MB vs. 5GB for tex-live), which is just enough to compile the template successfully

• Windows: install TeX-Live or MikTeX .
• Linux: install TeX-Live or MikTeX .
• macOS: install MacTeX (a macOS version of TeX-Live ) or MikTeX .
• Cloning the GitHub repository with git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/joaomlourenco/novathesis.git ; or
• Downloading the latest version from the GitHub repository as a Zip file
• The main file is named “ template.tex ”.
• Either load it in your favorite LaTeX text editor or compile it in the terminal with latexmk -shell-escape -file-line-error -pdf template . If you use a LaTeX text editor, please notice that the NOVAthesis template uses biber and not bibtex to process the bibliography, which means that most probably you have to open the Editor Preferences and somewhere (depends on the Editor) change bibtex to biber .
• If Murphy is elsewhere, LaTeX will create the file “ template.pdf ”, which you may open with your favorite PDF viewer.
• Edit the files in the “ Config ” folder:

• See 3. above.
• You’re done with a beautifully formatted thesis/dissertation! 😃

See above for using a local installation of LaTeX

NOVAthesis v6.10.10 is available as an Overleaf template . Just select open as template and follow from step 3 above !

• Download the latest version from the GitHub repository as a Zip file .
• Login to your favorite LaTeX cloud service. I recommend Overleaf but there are alternatives (these instructions apply to Overleaf and you’ll have to adapt for other providers).
• In the menu select New project -> Upload project
• Upload the zip with all the “novathesis” files.
• Select “ template.tex ” as the main file.
• Follow from step 3 above

• Install LaTeX in your computer and use a the template locally !
• Opt for a hassle free solution and buy a (student) plan in Overleaf .

Getting Help

Check the wiki and have some hope! :smile:

If you couldn’t find what you were looking for, ask for help in:

• The GitHub Discussions page (only EN please) at https://github.com/joaomlourenco/novathesis/discussions.
• The Facebook page (PT or EN) at https://www.facebook.com/groups/novathesis.
• The Reddit novathesis community at r/novathesis .
• You may also give a look at the novathesis blog at https://novathesis.blogspot.pt .

Please don’t try to contact me directly for questions or support, by email or any other channel! I will not answer such requests… The GitHub Discussions page and the Facebook page are the right places to ask for help and support!

• Do you have a suggestion? Please add it to the wiki and help other users!
• Did you find a bug? Please open an issue . Thanks!
• Would you like to request a new feature (or support of a new School)? Please open an issue . Thanks!

List of Supported Schools

• NOVA School for Science and Technology (FCT-NOVA)
• PhD in Information Management
• Master in Geographical Information Systems and Science
• Master in Statistics and Information Management
• Master in Information Management
• Master in Geospatial Technologies
• Master in Data Science and Advanced Analytics
• Masters in Geospatial Technologies
• National School of Public Heath (ENSP-NOVA)
• Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCSH-NOVA)
• Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biologica Antonio Xavier (ITQB-NOVA)
• Instituto Superior Técnico (IST-ULISBOA)
• Faculdade de Ciências (FC-ULISBOA)
• Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária (FMV-ULISBOA)
• Escola de Arquitetura (EA-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Ciências (EC-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Direito (ED-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Economia e Gestão (EEG-UMIMHO)
• Escolha de Engenharia (EE-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Medicina (EM-UMIMHO)
• Escola de Psicologia (EP-UMIMHO)
• Escola Superior de Enfermagem (ESE-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Educação (IE-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas (ILCH-UMIMHO)
• Instituto de Investigação em Biomateriais, Biodegradáveis e Biomiméticos (I3Bs-UMIMHO)

Departamento de Engenharia Informática e Sistemas de Informação (ULHT-DEISI)

<!– * ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

Escola de Tecnologia e Arquitectura (ETA-ISCTE-IUL) NOTE: this template is outdated (there are new covers/specifications) –>

• Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa (ISEL-IPL)

Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal

• Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Barreiro (ESTB-IPS)
• Escola Superior de Enfermagem do Porto (ESEP)

Although the template goes far beyond the cover… some covers from the supported schools are is display below.

These are not official templates for FCT-NOVA nor any other School, although we have done our best to make it fully compliant to each School regulations for thesis/dissertation presentation.

All contributors , both sporadic and regular, are welcome. :) Please contact me to join the team.

If you are here looking for the (deprecated) Word templates (not maintained anymore), please go to this other repository .

LaTeX Authoring With Overleaf: Theses in LaTeX

• Getting Started
• Theses in LaTeX
• Overleaf Training
• Workshop Syllabus

Caltech Thesis LaTeX template in Overleaf

As of January 2016, the Caltech Overleaf portal offers thesis authors a LaTeX template that reflects the regulations of the Office of Graduate Studies and the requirements of the Institute. There are two versions of the thesis template available: one with the approved Caltech logo; the other without a logo.

Downloading Overleaf template files

You can download the Overleaf template files as zip files to your own computer if you prefer to use them that way. Open up a blank thesis template on the Overleaf site, then click on Project at the top of the screen. A green box labeled “Download as ZIP” will show up in the left column, and you can choose which types of files you want to download.

Head of Research Services

Author Services and Thesis Librarian

• << Previous: Getting Started
• Next: Overleaf Training >>
• Last Updated: Nov 15, 2023 3:54 PM
• URL: https://library.caltech.edu/latex

Masters/Doctoral Thesis

This template provides a full framework for writing a graduate level thesis. It is carefully structured and separated into multiple parts for easy editing. Included are the following pages/sections: a cover page, declaration of authorship, quotation, abstract, acknowledgements, contents page(s), list of figures, list of tables, abbreviations, physical constants, symbols, dedication, example chapter, example appendix and bibliography.

Description

This template provides a full framework for writing a graduate level thesis. It is carefully structured and separated into multiple parts for easy editing. Included are the following pages/sections: a cover page, declaration of authorship, quotation, abstract, acknowledgements, contents page(s), list of figures, list of tables, abbreviations, physical constants, symbols, dedication, example chapter, example appendix and bibliography. An example chapter is included which explains the basics of LaTeX and this template. It contains everything you need to know to begin writing your academic thesis using this template. Important note: this template comes as a zip file with multiple files and folders within it. It is worth reading the Chapter 1 introduction to the thesis to get an idea of what they do.

This second major version of this template was made by Vel . The thesis style was originally created by Steve R. Gunn and modified into a template by Sunil Patel .

Current Version

v2.5 (August 27, 2017)

This template is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Click here to see what this license means for your use of the template.

Open Template for Free Editing Online

Download template, have a question.

• Ask a Question at LaTeX.org
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This page last updated on: August 27, 2017

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

The bibliography and list of references.

The Graduate School requires a Bibliography which includes all the literature cited for the complete thesis or dissertation. Quoting from the Graduate School’s Guidelines for the Format of Theses and Dissertations :

“Every thesis in Standard Format must contain a Bibliography which lists all the sources used or consulted in writing the entire thesis and is placed at the very end of the work. The complete citations are arranged alphabetically by last name of the author. Individual citations are not numbered. No abbreviations in titles of published works will be accepted. The full title of a book, journal, website, proceedings, or any other published work must be italicized or underlined. Citations must follow standards set by the style manual that the student is using. The bibliography for URI theses is not broken into categories.”

The List of References is not required by the Graduate School, but is the style commonly used in Engineering, Mathematics, and many of the Sciences. It consists of a numbered list of the sources used or consulted in writing the thesis in the order that they are referenced in the text. There can be either one List of References for the entire thesis, or a List of References at the end of each chapter.

Both the Bibliography and the List of References will be generated by the urithesis LaTeX class. All you need to do is add information about your sources to the references.bib file, which is a database containing all of the necessary information about the references, then cite the reference in your thesis using the \cite{} command.

Generating the Bibliography and References

The bibliography and list of references are generated by running BibTeX. To generate the bibliography, load the file thesisbib.tex into your editor, then run BibTeX on it.

If each chapter has its own list of references, you will need to run BibTeX on each chapter to update its list of references. If there is one list of references for the whole thesis (because you used the oneref option, you will only need to run BibTeX on the top level file thesis.tex .

How to Add a Bibliography Entry

When we want to refer to a source in the thesis, we place an entry for that source in the file references.bib , then cite the source in the thesis with the \cite{LABEL} command. The syntax for an entry in the references.bib file is of the form:

ENTRYTYPE is the type of bibliographic entry such as Book , Article , or TechReport , that this entry describes. At the end of this page is a list of all possible entry types .

LABEL is a unique string that is used to refer to this entry in the body of the thesis when using the \cite{LABEL} command.

The FIELDNAMEn entries are the fields that describe this entry, (ie. author, title, pages, year, etc.). Each entry type has certain required fields and optional fields. See the list of all entry types for a description of the available fields.

As an example, suppose we have a paper from a conference proceedings that we want to cite. First we make an entry in the our references.bib file of the form:

We then cite this source in the text of our thesis with the command \cite{re:toolan:as03} . This will generate a Bibliography entry that looks something like:

and a List of References entry that looks something like:

Types of List of References

The Graduate School requires that the bibliography is always at the end of the thesis and sorted alphabetically by author, therefore there is no options that affect it. The list of references is optional, therefore there are a few different ways that it can created.

By default a separate list of references appears at the end of each chapter, and are sorted by the order that they are cited in that chapter. The option oneref (see options ) will create a single list of references for the whole thesis, which due to the requirements of the Graduate School, will appear after the last chapter and before any appendices.

The option aparefs will cite references using the APA style, which is the last name of the author and year of publication, such as (Toolan, 2006), instead of the default IEEE style, which is a number, such as [1]. This option will also sort the references alphabetically by author, instead of in order of citation. The options oneref and aparefs can be used together to create a single list of references using the APA style.

Supported Bibliography Entry Types

The following is a list of all the entry types that can be used. Click on the desired type to see a detailed description of how to use that type.

• Article – An article from a journal or magazine
• Book – A book with an explicit publisher
• InBook – A part of a book, such as a chapter or selected page(s)
• InCollection – A part of a book having its own title
• Booklet – Printed and bound works that are not formally published
• Manual – Technical documentation
• InProceedings – An article in a conference proceedings
• Proceedings – The entire proceedings of a conference
• MastersThesis – A Master’s thesis
• PhDThesis – A Ph.D. dissertation
• TechReport – A report published by a school or other institution
• Unpublished – A document that has not been formally published
• Electronic – An internet reference like a web page
• Patent – A patent or patent application
• Periodical – A magazine or journal
• Standard – Formally published standard
• Misc – For use when nothing else fits

Articles that have not yet been published can be handled as a misc type with a note. Sometimes it is desirable to put extra information into the month field such as the day, or additional months. This is accomplished by using the BIBTEX concatenation operator “#“:

Example .bib using this type:

Books may have authors, editors or both. Example .bib using this type:

Inbook is used to reference a part of a book, such as a chapter or selected page(s). The type field can be used to override the word chapter (for which IEEE uses the abbreviation “ch.”) when the book uses parts, sections, etc., instead of chapters

Incollection is used to reference part of a book having its own title. Like book , incollection supports the series, chapter and pages fields. Also, the type field can be used to override the word chapter.

Booklet is used for printed and bound works that are not formally published. A primary difference between booklet and unpublished is that the former is/was distributed by some means. Booklet is rarely used in bibliographies.

Technical documentation is handled by the manual entry type.

References of papers in conference proceedings are handled by the inproceedings or conference entry type. These two types are functionally identical and can be used interchangeably. Example .bib using this type:

It is rare to need to reference an entire conference proceedings, but, if necessary, the proceedings entry type can be used to do so.

Master’s (or minor) theses can be handled with the mastersthesis entry type. The optional type field can be used to override the words “Master’s thesis” if a different designation is desired:

The phdthesis entry type is used for Ph.D. dissertations (major theses). Like mastersthesis , the type field can be used to override the default designation. Example .bib using this type:

Techreport is used for technical reports. The optional type field can be used to override the default designation “Tech. Rep.” Example .bib using this type:

The unpublished entry type is used for documents that have not been formally published. IEEE typically just uses “unpublished” for the required note field.

The electronic entry type is for internet references. IEEE formats electronic references differently by not using italics or quotes and separating fields with periods rather than commas. Also, the date is enclosed within parentheses and is placed closer to the title. This is probably done to emphasize that electronic references may not remain valid on the rapidly changing internet. Note also the liberal use of the howpublished field to describe the form or category of the entries. The organization and address fields may also be used. Example .bib using this type:

The nationality field provides a means to handle patents from different countries

The nationality should be capitalized. The assignee and address (of the assignee) fields are not used, however, they are provided. The type field provides a way to override the “patent” description with other patent related descriptions such as “patent application” or “patent request”:

The periodical entry type is used for journals and magazines.

The standard entry type is used for formally published standards. Alternatively, the misc entry type, along with its howpublished field, can be used to create references of standards.

Misc is the most flexible type and can be used when none of the other entry types are applicable. The howpublished field can be used to describe what exactly (or in what form) the reference is (or appears as). Possible applications include technical-report-like entries that lack an institution, white papers and data sheets.

Additional Comments

Because we are effectively creating multiple bibliographies, (one for the actual bibliography, and one for each list of references), the two LATEX commands \bibliographystyle{} and \bibliography{} are not used. They have been redefined to do nothing, and the equivalent of these commands are done automatically when necessary.

When there is a reference that should be included in the bibliography, but does not need to be explicitly referenced in the thesis, use the \nocite{} command. This command works like the \cite{} command, except it does not put the citation in the list of references, only in the bibliography. The \nocite{} command must appear after the first \newchapter{} command, or it will be ignored.

When using the option aparefs , and a citation does not have an author, (such as often occurs with a web page), the key field can be used to specify what to use in the citation instead of the author’s name.

About the Bibliography Format

The bibliography format used by the urithesis class is based on the IEEE format. See the article “How to Use the IEEEtran BIBTEX Style” by Michael Shell for more details.

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Your thesis or dissertation is often the most important single piece of work you’ll produce as a student (whether it be your final year undergraduate research project or your complete Masters / PhD thesis). These templates, many provided by the university themselves as official layout guidelines, include sections for you to add all the relevant author information (your university, department, supervisor, year, etc) along with placeholder chapters for your introduction, background, method, results, conclusion / discussion, references and appendices.

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