Harvard University collaborates across countries with Overleaf

Ashley Craig is a first year graduate student in Economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has embarked upon a six-year degree and needs an authoring tool that can accommodate both collaboration and the symbols and character sets that occur in his chosen field.

Although LaTeX is the accepted standard authoring tool for subjects such as Ashley’s – as it allows for the numerous symbols and specialized character sets that occur – LaTeX traditionally is not an easy tool to use for collaboration. In the past, to collaborate in LaTeX meant emailing large files back and forth and dealing with multiple versions of LaTeX desktop application files. This was not an ideal collaboration method for Ashley as he was working with academics across the globe at the University of Sydney in Australia and he wanted an easier way to work together. Ashley discovered Overleaf – its collaborative, cloud-based LaTeX writing platform was exactly what he required.

Collaborative efforts improved

“It’s more efficient to be writing in LaTeX from the very beginning of the research process,” says Ashley. “But collaboration is really painful with standard LaTeX. The support for collaboration across countries was what was really attractive about Overleaf for me.”

A co-author at Sydney uses Stata for data analysis. When the data or methodology is updated, they re-run the analyses and output the latest table in a .tex file for inclusion in the paper. Overleaf can handle the .tex file both for direct inclusion into the paper and also as an output file for the journal. The recent addition of Git-sync to Overleaf makes it even easier to push the latest versions of such data files to the paper, to ensure it is up to date with your most recent results.

Tracking and version control

Other functions that are well supported in Overleaf include simultaneous editing, the tracking of changes and comments and the merging of edits. Overleaf provides one source of truth for a file with version control.

Overleaf can also link to other popular programs such as Plot.ly, Stata, Matlab and R. More generally, any program that can output to a .tex file can be included in your workflow. Ashley has been very happy with the ease in which he can now write and collaborate on scientific documents and recommends Overleaf to his colleagues.

“It’s more efficient to be writing in LaTeX from the very beginning of the research process,” says Ashley. “But collaboration is really painful with standard LaTeX. The support for collaboration across countries was what was really attractive about Overleaf for me.”

With thanks to Stephen Cawley of Digital Science for co-ordinating the interviews and composition of this case study. A pdf version of this study is available here.
For more information on using Overleaf at your institution, please get in touch with Mary Anne Baynes via our contact form – we'd love to hear from you!