This work by Marvin Theiss is marked with CC0 1.0 
Screenshots of the LaTeX template provided in this repository.
This LaTeX template came about during my studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In the Mind, Brain and Behavior master's program, I had to write several essays. With a background in mathematics, I never really use Microsoft Word or similar WYSIWYG editors. Instead, I usually work exclusively with LaTeX, mostly through Overleaf. Thus, when it was time to write the first essay for the MBB program, I decided to quickly create my own LaTeX template to use during my studies in Giessen.
This template does not follow any particular guidelines regarding margins, paragraph indentation, and the like. Instead, I just went with a two-column layout and tweaked some basic settings until I was happy with the results.
To get started, you will need to download the template first. You can download all the necessary files in a ZIP file by clicking here. To start a new project in Overleaf, simply log in to your account (or register if you don't yet have one), and then click on New Project → Upload Project.
Uploading the template to Overleaf to start a new project.
Finally, simply drag and drop the ZIP file you have just downloaded to create a new project.
Once you have created a new project in Overleaf using the template provided in this repo, your screen should look something like this:
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Choose a meaningful name for your project. To do so, hover your mouse over the default name (here: latex-template) until a pencil icon appears. Click on it to change the project's name.
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Under
%% TITLE INFO %%, enter the information that will be used to create the title page of the essay. Be sure to remove any\dummy{...}commands, e.g., if you want to set the date to May 05, 2024, replace\date{\dummy{Month DD}, \dummy{YYYY}}with\date{May 05, 2024}.
This is the file that Overleaf compiles. Essentially, it brings together all of the separate files of the template to create the final PDF.
This file is responsible for the layout of the document. It defines the page margins, the appearance of headers and footers, and much more. It also loads all the packages used by LaTeX.
This is where all the .bib files needed to generate the list of references are stored. The list of references is generated by the biblatex package using APA style.
You guessed it, this is where you place all the images that you want to use in your essay.
This directory contains four different files. The abstract.tex file lets you create an abstract for your essay. To do so, simply replace \dummy{\lipsum[1-1]} with the appropriate text for your abstract, and then replace \dummy{keyword 1}, \dummy{keyword 2}, \dummy{keyword 3} with actual keywords for your essay. If you do not want to include an abstract at the beginning of your essay, simply ignore this file, comment out line 31 of the main.tex file that says \input{other/abstract.tex}, and uncomment the subsequent line.
The declaration.tex file contains a declaration of authorship and academic integrity. Feel free to change this to suit your needs. If not needed, simply comment out line 56 of the main.tex file that says \input{other/declaration.tex}.
The references.tex file controls the appearance of the list of references. You shouldn't need to change anything here.
Finally, the title.tex file creates the title page of the essay. Feel free to play around with this file to change the appearance of the title page, include additional information, and exclude information that you don't want to include.
This is where you place the .tex files containing the content of your essay. See Writing the Essay for details.
I have divided all my essays into sections and subsections (which, in rare cases, are further divided into subsubsections). Each subsection is corresponds to an individual .tex file that's placed in the sections/ directory mentioned above. These are included in the final PDF by adding an appropriate \input{sections/sectionX-Y.tex} command in the main.tex file.
The main text is split into subsections that are loaded individually.
There are two ways to include images in your essay, either at the top of each page (i.e., spanning across both columns) or as part of the text (i.e., within a single column). Both options are illustrated in the template and should be easy for you to modify/copy. To include your own image, you first need to upload the image file to the images/ directory and then replace example-image with the correct filename in the \includegraphics[...]{...} command. Image captions follow the best practices explained here.
An image that's placed within a single column.
The text used to illustrate this LaTeX template is not my own. Instead, it is taken from this student sample paper by Hannah Greenbaum provided by the American Psychological Association at apastyle.apa.org. In particular, I do not own any copyrights, and the license applied to this template does not apply to the text by Hannah Greenbaum used to illustrate the use of the template.
This work has been dedicated to the public domain, and all rights to this work worldwide under copyright law have been waived, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. However, when using or citing this work, you should not imply endorsement by the author.
For more detailed information, please review the full LICENSE text.