5 tips and tricks for more efficient group projects using Overleaf

Ever got frustrated writing an article or group project in Word or Google Docs? Overleaf is your best friend!

The logo of Overleaf.

Overleaf is a useful tool for writing a paper in LaTeX. However, some useful features of Overleaf can be overlooked when just starting out. This article describes the most useful tips and tricks. I originally made the document for my fellow students, but I figured other people may find it useful as well.

NOTE: Don’t stop reading when you think don’t know how to write in LaTeX. An inbuilt Word-like feature is available in Overleaf (in ‘Other features’ I explain how to get this feature).

Setting up your account

For most of the tips and tricks in Overleaf, you’ll need to have a Premium account. For student this is as low as 7 euro’s a month. Next to that, your university or institution may have a deal with Overleaf so students and staff members can use Overleaf for free. The advantages of a premium account are:

• Collaborating with unlimited other accounts;
• Syncing with Dropbox or GitHub;
• Integrating your Mendeley Citation Library

When having a Premium account, you can integrate your Dropbox, GitHub and Mendeley accounts by going to Account (button at top right) >> Account Settings.

Working in your document

After having made a new document, we can set up our additional features.

Setting up Mendeley

• Press the ’New file’ button at the top left (see fig. 1), and go to ’From Mendeley’ and add the bibliography you want.
• In your LaTeX document, add the following two lines: \bibliographystyle{plain}
  \bibliography{references}
  Where ’plain’ is the citation style which can be changed, and ’references’ is the filename of the bibliography you imported in your Overleaf repository.

Figure 1: At the top left, you can add new files to your Overleaf folder. The text highlighted in blue is the ‘articlekeyword’.

• In text, use \cite{articlekeyword} to cite a paper (see fig 1 to see what is meant as ’articlekeyword’)
  For the plain bibliographystyle, a citation in text will look like: [1] and your references will be alphabetically sorted. A reference will not show up in the bibliography section of your paper if you have not cited the paper in your text. Use \bibliographystyle{unsrt} to sort references in order of appearance.
• If you added more references in your Mendeley bibliography, update the references file in Overleaf by clicking on the references file and pressing ’Refresh’.

Inviting collaborators

• Go to the ’Share’ button at top right. Here, you can invite your group members

Syncing with GitHub

• Press the ’Menu’ button at top left.
• Press GitHub under the section Sync.
• Make a repository for your paper. This will contain all the files currently in your Overleaf repository.
• Having made the connection with a GitHub repository, you can push your changes by pressing the GitHub button using step 1 and 2.

Other nice features

• Change ’Source’ to ’Rich Text’ (buttons at the top of your LaTeX file) to change your working environment from plain LaTeX to an environment more comparable with a Word document, which can be handy if you are used to working in Word.
• You can add comments just as you would do in a Google Doc file by pressing the ’Review’ button at top left. A new column pops up; if you highlight some text, you can add a comment.
• I found most of this information on this page of the University of Amsterdam. Check the page for more tips, containing example links to some scientific journal templates.