If I’ve told you to read this post, you’re at a point where you have some preliminary results and it’s time to start thinking about how to present them. There are two components to this process. First, is the nuts-and-bolts of how to write up text that can be used for a thesis or journal article. The second is the matter of writing and making figures in a scientific style, suitable for the consumption by nerds.

LaTeX and Authorea

The core of the astrophysical writing process is the LaTeX typesetting system. LaTeX is a lot like computer code in that it uses a specific code to describe precisely what the computer should do with the characters on a page. If you’ve ever been frustrated with Word for automatically formatting some text into the way some random chucklehead at Microsoft thought it should look, then LaTeX is the answer. Of note, LaTeX produces beautiful math and tracks references well. LaTeX does suffer from the basic problem of any code based system namely: “why did my computer do that?” Note that LaTeX is pronounced “Lah-tek” because the TeX part of the name is supposed to be the Greek math $\tau \epsilon \chi$, which would be pronounced “tek” since the last character is a “chi.” The similarity to the material latex can lead to unfortunate Google results. Be careful.

To get started, we will use something that combines the flexibility of a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor with LaTeX in a shared environment. There are a few solutions, but for reasons of where I come from, I’m contractually obligated to like authorea. To get started, wander over the the authorea website and create an account. Then start a manuscript using the “New Article” button. The article should be public not private. Give it a title and take a look at the result.

When you click on the placeholder text, you enter in the LaTeX editing mode by default. This will have a bunch of text uses commands with a \ (backslash) format. The typical LaTeX command has the anatomy

\command[optional keywords]{arguments}

where the \command part tells the processer what it should accomplish, the [optional keywords] are modifiers to the command and {arguments} are the things the command needs to know. For example,

\section{Grapefruits}

uses the \section command to start a new section and Grapefruits is the title. You can generally cut-copy-paste text into LaTeX but beware a few things:

• The % character is the comment line in LaTeX so anything after that line will be ignored by the LaTeX system. If you want a percent sign, use \%
• The $ character puts the system into math mode for typesetting equations.
• The & is a tab (like four spaces) character. If you want an ampersand, use \&.
• The ~ character is a “sticky space” so it will appear as a space in your document and, more usefully, it won’t let lines of text break at the sticky space.

There are other things that will cause problems, but these are the ones that usually defeat my copy-paste approach.

A complete tutorial on LaTeX is here but the useful content for a quick start is the math section here.

Returning to Authorea, it’s time to import your preliminary write-ups into Authorea. Go ahead and take some text you’ve generated and add it to the article you’ve created. Invite me to the article using the “Share” button and then we’re off to the journals!

The Skeleton of a Scientific Article

A astronomy article usually follows the same basic template with a few different sections. Below, I list them in order and make a few notes. Now is a good time to start conforming to the style.

1. The title / author block - This is pretty straight-forward. Don’t worry about a perfect title now.
2. The abstract - This is a summary of your entire article. This is the absolute last thing to write. Put in some placeholder text here.
3. Introduction - This takes the reader from general astronomy all the way down to your contribution. It usually follows the pattern of
   1. General statements about why you care about the topic.
   2. Previous but related work in the field which raises some interesting questions.
   3. If you’re looking at a specific target, you can describe the target here and discuss why it’s a good target.
   4. Statement of the big problem you aim to solve.
   5. Sometimes, an outline of the paper.
4. Observations/Data - This presents the data that are used in the paper and summarizes how they were collected and their basic properties. If appropriate, it also describes the target(s) which are being studied. It also describes the algorithms that are used to produce the results.
5. Paper Core – This presents the core analysis methods interleaved with the results, aiming to be “matter-of-fact”
6. Discussion – This part describes the implications of the Paper Core results.
7. Conclusions – A too-long;didn’t-read (tl;dr) summary of the main results of the paper, often in enumerated form.
8. Appendices – Any tedious results that most people won’t care about but are really important things to check.