Summary We can use Markdown in conjunction with BibTex to generate academic papers with citations. This is preferable to writing in LaTeX for a few reasons. First, Markdown is much simpler to write and easier to read. Secondly, Markdown is lighter and much more flexible, allowing easy conversion/rendering to PDF, HTML, DOCX, etc.
Setup
To generate citations, we need a .bib file, formatted appropriately. To write the .bib file by hand, we can pull the citations from Google Scholar. For example,
@article{hegg2018preservice,
title={Preservice teacher proficiency with transformations-based congruence proofs after a college proof-based geometry class},
author={Hegg, Meredith and Papadopoulos, Dimitri and Katz, Brian and Fukawa-Connelly, Timothy},
journal={The Journal of Mathematical Behavior},
volume={51},
pages={56--70},
year={2018},
publisher={Elsevier}
}In this example, hegg2018preservice is the citation key that we’ll use in our markdown file to refer to this citation. We can make it whatever we like.
Pandoc
To get started, the following terminal command will generate a PDF (or HTML) file using the selected .bib file:
pandoc TestPaper.md --bibliography biblio.bib -o out.pdf This will place the works cited at the end of the document. To create a separate works cited page, we can add the following to the bottom of our document:
\newpage
## Works CitedStyles
The default citation style for pandoc is Chicago. We can add the --csl option to our pandoc command to select an alternative citation style.
--csl=/Users/chris/Documents/writing/chicago.cslCitations
In-Line
We can generate standard in-line citations by using brackets: [@hegg2018preservice]. This will add the appropriately formatted citation - e.g., if using MLA, APA, or Chicago, it’ll drop a parenthetical reference.
Another option for in-line citations is to include them mid-sentence without the brackets.
As discussed in @hegg2018preservice, yadda, yadda, yadda...Footnotes
To include a citation as a footnote, we use the following syntax.
- Add
[^1]where the superscript ought to go. - Include the citation as a footnote anywhere in the document in the following form
[^1]: [@hegg2018preservice]
Options
We can include page numbers, paragraph numbers, and comments in in-line citations.
[@hegg2018preservice, p. 18 - 23]Document formatting
To get things double-spaced, include this in the header:
---
geometry: margin=1in
header-includes:
- \usepackage{setspace}
- \doublespacing
---