Stanford University on Overleaf
Overview
The Stanford University Libraries are providing free Overleaf Pro accounts for all students, faculty and staff who would like to use a collaborative, online LaTeX editor for their projects.
Overleaf is designed to make the process of writing, editing and producing your research papers and project reports much quicker for both you and your collaborators. Overleaf can also be linked to other services such as Mendeley, Git and Plot.ly to best fit into your workflow.
Claim your free 10GB Pro account on Overleaf by signing up (or signing in) below. You'll need to verify a Stanford University email address in order to receive your free Pro account.
Join a community of authors at Stanford University
Quick Start
Welcome to the Stanford University quick start guide to Overleaf. We've put together some useful resources and links in the sections below, and if you have any questions about how to get started please let us know and we'll be happy to help!
For Students
Try out the Overleaf editor with built in tutorial
If you'd like to dive straight into the editor, simply click the button to create a new paper using our quick-start template. A short tutorial will walk you through the main features to quickly get you started.
Browse the Overleaf template gallery
You can find more Stanford-related templates below, or check out our full template gallery for more ideas and inspiration.
Take our free course to quickly master the LaTeX essentials
If you're new to LaTeX, we've put together a free online course to help you learn the basics. If you have never used LaTeX before, or if it has been a while and you would like a refresher, this is the place to start.
For Researchers
Find a journal template
Through our partnerships within the publishing community, we provide a selection of academic journal templates for articles and papers. These templates automatically format your manuscripts in the style required for submission to that journal.
Edit in Rich Text mode or directly in LaTeX
Overleaf provides and intuitive and easy-to-use manuscript editor (our rich text mode), which is especially useful if you or your co-authors aren't familiar with writing in LaTeX.
If you prefer to edit directly in LaTeX, you can! Overleaf provides a full collaborative online LaTeX editor you can switch to at any time.
Submitting your articles to journals, repositories and more
You can also submit your paper directly to a number of journals and other editorial and review services via the publish menu in the editor. Simply open the publish menu from any document and follow the appropriate 'Submit to ...' link.
For Teachers
Publishing your projects in the Overleaf gallery
A quick way to share your course templates or lecture notes is to publish them in the Overleaf gallery. You can publish any project from Overleaf to the gallery in just a few clicks.
Setting up your class
Simply click the button to set up a group on Overleaf for your class. You'll then be able to add students to your group by email address.
Using the Overleaf assignment creation & submission tools
Once you've set up your class (see above), this video shows you how to create and distribute assignments to your students.
You can also read a quick guide to the assignment tools on our blog.
FAQ & Help
Who should I contact if I have questions about Overleaf or the Stanford license?
Please use our contact form and we'll make sure your question gets to the right person in our team. You can also direct Stanford-specific questions to Helen Josephine, Head of the Terman Engineering Library.
I'm new to Overleaf, how should I get started?
We've put together a short How do I use Overleaf help page to give you pointers on exactly that :)
More
Quick links to Overleaf integration guides
- Linking your Mendeley account, for quick import of your Mendeley reference library.
- Work offline with Git: how to sync your Overleaf projects using Git.
- See also How to synchronize an Overleaf LaTeX paper with a Github repository (external).
- How to create plots and figures with Plot.ly and import them into your Overleaf projects.
- How to publish your projects on figshare to get an instant DOI.
- How to import your references from Zotero.
- How to setup an auto-backup using Overleaf → Dropbox → BitBucket (external).
More resources from Stanford Libraries
- The library's Bibliographic Management page which also includes general information on LaTeX and BibTeX.
- The School of Engineering's Technical Communication Program (TCP), a resource for students seeking to strengthen their technical writing and/or speaking skills.
- The official Stanford guidelines for dissertations.