latex dissertation vorlage

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.

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

• Documentation: Documentation for the template is available in pdf format here .
• Download: The most current LaTeX files for this template are distributed through the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN): https://ctan.org/pkg/mitthesis Download
• Overleaf.com: A copy of the thesis template is also present in Overleaf.com's template gallery, here . Overleaf includes all the packages in TeX Live, so no additional downloads are needed. Learn more about Overleaf at MIT .

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 The original template served MIT well; but by the early 2020s, it was substantially out of date.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.

Overleaf for Scholarly Writing & Publication: LaTeX Theses and Dissertations

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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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Every project you create has a secret link. Just send it to your co-authors, and they can review, comment and edit. Overleaf synchronizes changes from all authors, so everyone always has the latest version. More advanced tools include protected projects and integration with Git.

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

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Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Using Templates on Overleaf

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Start your projects with quality LaTeX templates for journals, theses, dissertations, CVs, resumes, papers, presentations, posters, assignments, letters, project reports, and more.

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Upload or create templates for assignments, presentations, theses, posters, and student/faculty journals for your institution. Just create it as a project on Overleaf and use the publish menu.

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Write your thesis using the official ' Name of University goes here ' thesis template

Find your University's template on Overleaf here ( insert link to official LaTeX thesis template on Overleaf Gallery or custom Overleaf institutional portal template page ).

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Writing your dissertation with LaTeX

Target group.

Doctoral candidates who want to learn how to use LaTeX for writing academic texts, including but not limited to their dissertation.

Course Description

We‘ve all been there....you are working late into the night trying to finish a paper, but the figures won‘t go where you want them to and the references for your bibliography are getting mixed up....and the footnotes...don‘t even get me started! Thanks, Microsoft Word!

But what if there was another way? Maybe there is: LaTeX .

So what is LaTeX and why should you use it to write your dissertation?

LaTeX is document preparation typesetting system that uses plain text input in order to create an attractive end product. This software has been in use in academia for decades and improvements are continuously made. It is especially useful for formatting large documents such as books, scientific articles or an academic thesis. LaTeX makes it easy to include references, figures with captions, nice looking tables and equations, and can save you some stress when writing your dissertation in addition to making your thesis stand out for its fabulous formatting!

By the end of the workshop, you will:

• Have a clearer sense of how to use LaTeX and for what purposes
• Get comfortable with the LaTeX programming environment
• Learn how to include figures, references, equations, cross-references, table of contents, title pages, etc.
• Have a clearer sense of the advantages and disadvantages of LaTeX
• Create a plan of action to organize your written dissertation with LaTeX

In this course, we will be using Overleaf, a free web-based LaTeX editor to demonstrate the functionality of LaTeX and in the end we will create a personalized template that you can use for your thesis! The course wil be taught in English, but if you are writing in German, this is not a problem. The same principles apply and questions can be asked in German or English.

Prerequisites

Dr. Tina Lampe Friedrichstraße 41-43 Tel.: +49 (0)761 203-6817 Fax: +49 (0)761 203-9665 [email protected]

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Dissertations and Theses

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

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.

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

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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Every project you create has a secret link. Just send it to your co-authors, and they can review, comment and edit. Overleaf synchronizes changes from all authors, so everyone always has the latest version. More advanced tools include protected projects and integration with Git.

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An academic thesis, also known as a dissertation, is a substantial work produced by a graduate student to communicate their research and earn a degree. A thesis will typically include a review of the current state of research in the field of study followed by a central hypothesis to be investigated. The bulk of the thesis will then focus on the methods and results of the research performed, followed by a discussion on how the results add to the field in general. Theses are long, highly structured and include a lot of advanced document elements.

This template is designed for writing books and graduate-level theses and provides numerous examples and documentation to enable complex requirements. The design features a relatively narrow main text column with an adjacent wide margin to house notes, figures, tables, citations and captions.

• View Template Information

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.

Classicthesis Typographic Thesis

This template has been designed as a homage to the Elements of Typographic Style. As such, it has an air of efficiency and optimal design. It is suitable for any high-level degree thesis such as for a PhD, Masters or Honors. Sections within the thesis are clearly separated in a consistent way, as are sections within each chapter. The default structure of the thesis proceeds in the following order: title page, dedication, abstract, publications, acknowledgements, contents, list of tables/figures/listings, acronyms, content chapters, appendices, bibliography, colophon and declaration.

Maggi Memoir Thesis

This template uses the memoir document class to beautifully typeset a thesis. It is suitable for any high-level degree thesis such as for a PhD, Masters or Honors. The layout of the content is in a thin format to promote easy reading and the template features advanced specification of margins and trimming. The thesis boasts a professional look which is immediately obvious from the title page itself and carries through the design of the rest of the document. Three custom fonts are used in the template to match the design and beautifully display your content.

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Alexander Fabisch

Latex for dissertations.

Since writing a dissertation is usually something that you do only once, I gathered a lot of knowledge that I probably won't need anymore. This is a brief summary of how the LaTeX code of my dissertation is structured. I hope it can be an inspiration for someone else. As I used continuous integration to automatically build the PDF and check PDF/A-1b validity, I will also talk about this in the end.

Include vs. Input

If you want to split your LaTeX code into multiple files you can use ' \input ' or ' \include '.

will have the same effect as copying everything from mychapter.tex here.

will create a page break before it includes the file. It does not work in the preamble though. The benefit of \include is that you can put

in the preamble to only compile a selected subset of all chapters to make compilation much faster. It does not mess up the references (e.g., table of contents, bibliography, and glossary). This can be used if you work on a specific chapter. I found this out at the end of writing my thesis. That is why I put it in the beginning here. Don't make the same mistake. This will save you lots of time.

I use \input for everything in the preamble (e.g., package imports, glossary entries) and \include for my chapters.

Document Class

I highly recommend to use the book class of Koma-Script for a dissertation. This is my configuration for the final document. One of the more obscure options here is ' headings=twolinechapter ', which will print "Chapter X." in a separate line before the title of a chapter. ' listof=totoc,listof=chapterentry ' will add lists of tables and figures as chapters to the table of contents.

I recommend to use Koma-Script in combination with the following package:

This will fix some common problems

• Documentation: Koma-Script ‘book’ class

Document Structure

This is the overall structure of the LaTeX document.

A large document is often split into (1) something before the main text (front matter), (2) main text (main matter), and (3) something after the main text (back matter).

This is everything before the main text. ' \frontmatter ' will activate roman page numbers and deactivate chapter numbering.

' \mainmatter ' will switch to Arabic page numbers and turn on chapter numbering. So here we have all the main text with numerous subdivisions. I avoided to have less than two subdivisions per level. If you have, e.g., a section with only one subsection, you should think about whether you really need a subsection here. You might want to integrate the subsection in the section or make a new section instead of a subsection.

' \appendix ' will switch chapter numbering to letters.

' \backmatter ' will turn of chapter numbering. Putting the list of figures and tables to the end is unusual. These typically are part of the front matter. I found it to distracting at the beginning though and put it to the end. We will come to the glossary and the bibliography later.

• Explanation of document structure

Bibliography and Citations

Although I used bibtex before, I chose to use biber and biblatex for my thesis.

The main reason for this decision is that it allows to easily create environments for which you can generate a specific bibliography. I used this feature to generate for each chapter a list of corresponding publications. Here is an example:

The option ' natbib ' ensures that you can use ' \citep{key} ' to generate citations of the form '(Names et al., Year)' and ' \citet{key} ' to generate 'Names et al. (Year)'.

Now you have to run ' biber documentname ' (without file ending) after the first pass of your LaTeX engine. A useful feature of biber is that it can also check your .bib files for validity with ' biber --tool -V literature.bib '.

For better line breaks I used the command ' \sloppy ' before the complete bibliography. Otherwise I had many lines (URLs, DOIs, etc.) that would go over the text borders. It allows more space between words though.

Note that "[w]hen using babel [...] with biblatex, loading csquotes is recommended to ensure that quoted texts are typeset according to the rules of your main language." ( source )

csquotes is also good if you want to quote in the text:

or as a new block:

• Package documentation: biblatex
• Biblatex Cheat Sheet
• Package documentation: csquotes

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

In smaller documents it is easy to keep track of abbreviations and whether you already introduced them or not. With a document exceeding 100 pages I would suggest to use tools that support a proper glossary. LaTeX can do this automatically.

To create a glossary you have to call

in the document. Then you can define abbreviations with

will result in "Markov Decision Process (MDP) or MDPs" (' \glspl ' means plural). The abbreviation will be introduced once and then only the abbreviation will be printed. No need to think about it. Later in the document you can print the glossary with

The package option ' toc ' will add it to the table of contents.

Note that the external command ' makeglossaries documentname ' (without file ending) has to be executed after the first pass of your LaTeX engine.

• Package documentation: glossaries

Document Layout

There are several packages that can help you to fine-tune the layout.

This package provides the command \layout that will print page layout variables for your document. This is the result in my case (shows both sides):

If you want to find out specific dimensions in the unit that you are interested in, the following package is useful:

For example, put

in the document for millimeter. I found it useful to find out the text dimensions and then scale figures appropriately without rescaling them in LaTeX.

A good way to check if there are any overfull horizontal boxes is the ' showframe ' option of the geometry package:

This will draw lines around the important areas of each page.

The following package allows you to draw a grid on every page to precisely place elements.

• Package documentation: layout
• Package documentation: layouts
• Package documentation: eso-pic

The Mean Printer and Marginal Notes

I printed my dissertation on my own. It turned out that the printer that I used (with the specific driver that I used) didn't print 4.23 mm at each side of the paper. Unfortunately, I had some marginal notes that the printer wouldn't print completely; one and a half letter were missing. I fixed that by setting

after using the layout package to find out the previous marginparwidth and converting 4.23 mm to pt according to this table . Since there was now less space for the margin notes, LaTeX couldn't find a good way to break lines and I modified my command to make notes on the margin to

which works only with Koma-Script in this form. The text is smaller and it is aligned to the direction of the page's center. But the conclusion of this should be: check the printer before you print!

If you use pdflatex and have to write accented characters (and this is very likely if you want to cite anything from authors with Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, ... names) you should better import the fontenc package before inputenc. It enables proper hyphenation of words that contain accented characters and allows to copy those characters from the output document. If you want to write your thesis in UTF-8 you should import inputenc. This is not required if you build your thesis with a UTF-8 based engine like lualatex though.

• Package documentation: fontenc
• Package documentation: inputenc
• Why should I use fontenc?

This is required in my thesis because it is written in English but has a German summary in the beginning because this is required by my university.

Babel changes the language of a document, that is, translates "table of contents", "chapter", citations, and dates if the default language is not English. It will also apply proper hyphenation to the text. It is possible to use multiple languages. The default language is the last option of the package. We can switch to other languages per section with

• Package documentation

Figures and Illustrations

This is something that you usually should not do, but sometimes I found it aesthetic to extend a figure a bit on one side:

Note that this is for an image on a left page. On a right page you have to play around with \oddsidemargin and \leftmargin .

• Package documentation: chngpage

Full Page Image

This package provides the command ' \thisfloatpagestyle ' to remove the header and the page number and I used it for large figures that fill an entire page.

• Package documentation: floatpag

Barrier for Figures

Precise figure placement is hard.

This package provides the command

that prevents floats from moving past this line. I found this useful to force LaTeX to make a page with multiple figures.

• Package documentation: placeins

Figure Surrounded by Text

Example (figure on the right side):

• Package documentation: wrapfig

Multiple Subfigures

In papers, you often see floats that consist of multiple figures that were arranged manually, for example, with a tabular environment. You don't have to do that. Use this package.

It provides the command ' \subfloat ':

If you have multiple subfigures with different heights it is difficult to arrange them vertically. There is a package for that.

Now, to arrange two figures vertically at the center, you can use the option ' valign=m ' of ' \includegraphics ' that is provided by adjustbox and you should add a phantom box of the size of the second figure to the first one.

• Package documentation: subfig
• Package documentation: adjustbox
• Vertical alignment

More Beautiful Tables

Here (in particular slide 8) is a good guide on how to make nice tables.

Table over Multiple Pages

In a few cases I had to make tables that are longer than one page.

You can define a table head that appears on every page (everything before ' \endhead ').

The rules are defined in the package booktabs.

• Package documentation: longtable
• Package documentation: booktabs

Code Listing

For code formatting I use the following package:

• Package documentation: listings

I use the following two packages to typeset pseudocode.

An algorithm in a float environment looks like this.

• Wikibook LaTeX on pseudocode

A font similar to Times New Roman for math. The package also provides several typical mathematical symbols. Thus, it collides with amssymb and you can't use both. This is how the result looks like:

To change the appearance of ' \mathcal ' I use the following package:

• Package documentation: newtxmath
• Package documentation: euscript

For consistent appearance of units I highly recommend this package.

Now you can write in your text:

and much more complex units. You also don't have to think about whether you had put a space between the number and the unit before. The package automatically does this for you.

• Package documentation: siunitx

I found it useful to put notes in the PDF output.

Use the option [disable] for final version.

You can also print a list of all notes with

• Package documentation: todonotes

Beginning of a Chapter

I like to put a related quote at the beginning of a chapter. You can do that with the scrbook class.

Another chapter looks like this at the beginning:

There are two elements here. The first one is the style of the heading, which can be defined in scrbook like this:

The image at the top is included with tikz :

If you want to do this, the image should of course be somewhat related to the content of the chapter.

Widows and Orphans

"In typesetting, widows and orphans are lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph which are left dangling at the top or bottom of a page or column, separated from the rest of the paragraph." ( Wikipedia ) A single line at the top or bottom of a page is just not aesthetic and we want to avoid that. The simplest trick is to set high penalties for them globally in the preamble (which means before ' \begin{document} '):

Another trick that I used often is to enlarge a page by one line with

It looks better if both the left and right page have the same length, so I typically extended them both.

• Widows (TeXFAQ)

Prior Publications

Although my dissertation is a monograph, large parts of it have been published before. Prior publication must be indicated. This is good scientific practice. Otherwise, for example, survey papers can be distorted. I put marginal notes at the beginning of a chapter or section that refer to publications that the text is based on. At the end of each chapter the corresponding publications are listed. At the same place I describe my contributions and the contributions of my co-authors.

My library requires a specific format for electronic publication of the thesis: PDF/A-1b .

The first step to ensure that your document is compatible is to test for compatibility. There are many tools out there that claim to enable this but many of them don't actually work. The tool that I relied on in the end is veraPDF . Since it is used more as a GUI tool, I had to find something that has a similar functionality but works from a command line to integrate it into continuous integration. For that I use Apache preflight 1.8.16 (available here ), which was compatible to the package openjdk-13-jdk that I used in my Ubuntu 20.04 docker image that I used for continuous integration. I had problems setting up preflight 2.X. Although preflight complains about some issues that veraPDF does not see, these can be ignored so that I could test for PDF/A-1b during continuous integration with good enough certainty.

If you only want to check whether all fonts are embedded, you can use

and check the column emb .

The main problem with PDF/A-1b compatibility are PDF figures. I work a lot with inkscape for illustrations and matplotlib for plots. My solution for this problem is to use ghostscript to convert every PDF that is included in the main document to PDF/A-1b:

To make the main LaTeX document compatible I use the package pdfx, which already takes care of a lot of problems and should be important almost at the beginning:

Package documentation: pdfx

However, this is not enough to fix all problems in my case so that I also had to let ghostscript convert the whole document.

Continuous Integration

I used git for version control and continuous integration to automatically build and validate the latest version of my thesis. I set up a docker container based on a recent Ubuntu to match my system.

You certainly don't need all of these packages (e.g., libreoffice or pdftk). As mentioned previously, preflight was used to check PDF/A-1b compatibility. The docker image is also available as ' af01/dissertation ' from dockerhub.

I used GitLab CI. My setup looks similar to this (some checks are omitted):

Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis

This LaTeX template is used by many universities as the basis for thesis and dissertation submissions, and is a great way to get started if you haven't been provided with a specific version from your department.

This version of the template is provided by Vel at LaTeXTemplates.com , and is already loaded in Overleaf so you can start writing immediately.

Checkout this short video to see how to easily create and edit new chapters as your thesis develops.

Please read the unofficial quick guide to the template; it contains some tips and suggestions on how to modify certain things.

(Updated 27/08/17)

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LaTeX disseration and thesis template for The Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis.

wustl-cse/wustl-latex-dissertation-template

Folders and files, repository files navigation, dissertation and thesis template.

The is a LaTeX version of the dissertation and thesis template for The Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis. ( http://graduateschool.wustl.edu/policies-and-guides )

Template version: July 2016

This document contains the guidelines for the proper formatting of dissertations and theses for doctoral and master’s degree-seeking students within the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis. The document is formatted using the same guidelines it describes. Consequently, by making an extra copy of this document, you can use it as a template in which you can replace the original text with your own while still retaining the general formatting.

It is a good idea to read through this document carefully before you save it as a template and begin. Please remember that all doctoral and master’s students are ultimately responsible for meeting the Graduate School (GS) formatting guidelines. If there is a particular issue that is not found in this template or the Dissertation/Thesis Guide, your committee or discipline should decide how it will be addressed.

Be certain to use your own full name (as recorded in WebSTAC ) where appropriate. Make sure you use the month and year your degree is officially to be earned on the title page, abstract page and, if included, vita page(s).

Once completed, you will need to submit your document as a PDF electronically, as per the Doctoral Dissertation Guide and Master’s Thesis Guide , which also can be found on the Graduate School website.

How to Use this Template

This template is a LaTeX version of The Graduate School's Microsoft Word template. To use, make a copy all of the files (or fork this repository) and start replacing the contents with your dissertation or thesis.

You will need a texlive installation. You will need to use LuaLaTeX or PDFLatex for this template. However, LuaLaTeX is preferred due to its built in support of special characters.

For your bibliography you will need Biber installed. Please note that this template uses Biblatex (not BibTeX). Biblatex is considered a replacement for BibTeX and supports special characters and URLs in citations.

You will also need Latexmk. Latexmk compiles LaTeX documents the correct number of times. Many makefiles for LaTeX documents often compile twice. Sometimes this is unnecessary, other times it is not enough. Latexmk will correctly determine the number of compilations necessary to produce a correct document.

When including figures, please use PDF files whenever possible. If it's not possible, add a rule to the Makefile and latexmkrc files to convert the image to PDF during compilation.

To compile: make

To clean build files, but not the compiled document: make clean

To clean all files, included the compiled document: make distclean

Contributing

Please help keep this template up to date with The Graduate School's Microsoft Word template.

If you would like to submit changes to this template, please fork this repository and submit a pull request.

• Makefile 2.5%

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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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