This template provides researchers with a project structure that supports an integrated, reproducible, and transparent writing process with Quarto. academicwriting consolidates Quarto templates for academic articles, abstracts, pre-analysis plans, conference presentations, and R&R memos, keeping all files in a clean, organized structure. If you’ve ever struggled to streamline your projects, this may help.
The basic idea of academicwriting is to provide a comprehensive framework for writing research articles, consolidating all necessary components into a single repository. By organizing all data wrangling, analysis, and writing in one place, this framework ensures that (1) every part of the research project references the same data and literature—allowing for streamlined analysis and a more efficient writing process—and (2) co-authors and readers can clearly understand the processes behind the project.
The templates also include writing guides and best-practice examples to support both the technical and substantive aspects of writing. 💫
The template synthesizes work from other researchers. All pdf-writing templates are adapted from Christopher Kenny’s Nature Quarto template, available here. The abstract features a wording template by Fabrizio Gilardi, available here. The pre-analysis template is from OSF, available here, with a markdown version by Frederik Aust, available here.
In the sub-sections in this README are detailed instructions for all specific templates within the academicwriting framework.
To use this template, you should have:
- TinyTeX installed
if (!requireNamespace("tinytex", quietly = TRUE)) {
install.packages("tinytex")
}To download the template, simply use this line of code in your RStudio terminal. This automatically clones the directory. When asked to name the project, you can provide a path to save it in a desired location. I recommend associating the directory with a new R project.
quarto use template danielkuhlen/academicwriting
The basic idea of academicwriting is that all parts of the writing process reference the same data, figures, and literature. Reference files are stored in the folders _bibliography, _data, and _figures. Templates for specific outputs within a research project (e.g., a pre-analysis plan) are stored in separate folders. See Figure 1 for an organizational chart of the repository.
This folder stores all relevant data. The input folder contains all raw files, while the output folder is for files that have already been processed or analyzed.
- /data
- /input
- /output
This folder is for scripts used during the data wrangling process. The template includes an example R script.
- /wrangling
- /example_script.R
This folder stores all the literature you reference in your project. I recommend connecting Zotero (with the Better BibTeX extension) to this folder, which will automatically export all citations.
- /bibliography
- /bib.bib
This folder stores all figures you create.
- /figures
- /example_figure.png
This folder contains the Nature article template by Christopher Kenny. The template is slightly modified with a "parent" file, paper.qmd, that stores the YAML and all metadata. Rendering this produces the PDF. All sections are in the subdirectory /sections under individual QMD files to keep the writing process organized without one super long QMD file.
- /paper
- /paper.qmd (This is the core file. Rendering this produces the PDF.)
- /sections (This is where you write the different sections.)
- /introduction.qmd
- /theory.qmd
- /casestudy.qmd
- /methods.qmd
- /results.qmd
- /conclusion.qmd
- /appendix.qmd
- /extensions (Stores TeX files for formatting)
The output will then look like this: 
- /abstract
- /abstract.qmd (This is the core file. Rendering this produces the PDF)
- /extensions (Stores TeX files for formatting)
The output will then look like this: 
- /presentation -/presentation.qmd (Core File. Rendering this produces the HTML Slides)
The output will then look like this: 
- /pap
- /pap.qmd (This is the core file. Rendering this produces the PDF)
- /extensions (Stores TeX files for formatting)
The output will then look like this: 
This repository builds upon Christopher Kenny’s Quarto template, which is licensed under the MIT License.
Kenny’s template, in turn, modifies the Springer Nature journal article template package. The original Nature template is licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License 1.3c (LPPL 1.3c). All further modifications can be seen in this repository.
This repository is intended for academic manuscript preparation and complies with the license terms of both the LPPL and MIT licenses.