LaTeX – PLOS
PLOS Medicine publishes research and commentary of general interest with clear implications for patient care, public policy or clinical
PLOS Medicine publishes research and commentary of general interest with clear implications for patient care, public policy or clinical research agendas.
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Submitting a LaTeX manuscript? Follow these guidelines to make sure it is properly formatted for the PLOS system.
Guidelines for all manuscripts are listed in the author instructions.
Need assistance? Email latex@plos.org.
PLOS provides a template for LaTeX submissions. Download the template.
The template linked above is optimized for the latest June 2022 LaTeX release and may return errors if you are using an older version of LaTeX. Click here to download an older version of the template.
Use this template to help format your article for our production process. You can add packages to this template but please do not remove any that are already included.
The zip also contains the plos2015.bst BibTeX style sheet. Use this file to specify the formatting of your BibTeX file as it will ensure that your references are generated in the correct format.
You are required to use LaTeX2e. Download the latest version.
For your initial submission, upload the PDF as your manuscript file, containing your manuscript text, figure legends, tables, and references.
You can choose whether to provide your LaTeX source file along with the PDF version for the initial submission, but it will be required should you be invited to submit revisions. If your manuscript .tex is separated into several .tex files, combine these into a single, cohesive .tex file before submission. Make sure to update your PDF file with the most recent version of your manuscript.
As stated in the PLOS template, your reference information should be included in your .tex file (not submitted separately as .bib or .bbl). See the References section below for more information.
Authors submitting manuscripts in the health sciences to PLOS Medicine may choose to have PLOS forward their submission to medRxiv for consideration for posting as a preprint.
If you choose this option, you may supply your own preprint PDF, or use the PDF generator in the submission system to have a PDF created for you.
Your manuscript source file should not call on external files (do not use input or externaldocument).
Include all portions of equations within the math environment in order to ensure it is correctly rendered.
Do not include figures in the manuscript PDF. Submit figures as separate TIFF or EPS files. Figures with multiple panels (subfigures) should be uploaded as a single file. Do not upload each panel/subfigure separately.
PLOS does not accept figures generated in LaTeX. PLOS only accepts figures as TIFF or EPS files, which can be created in standard software such as Adobe Illustrator, InkScape, PyMol, MatLab, or SAS.
If any part of the equation or phrase includes a character only available in math mode, then include the entire equation/phrase in one math environment.
Do not include commas or other normal (text) punctuation in the math environment, if possible.
Supporting Information requirements for LaTeX do not differ from the requirements for normal manuscripts. See our Supporting Information guidelines for more detailed instructions.
As stated in the PLOS template, your reference information should be included in your .tex file (not submitted separately as .bib or .bbl). Here is a step-by-step way to include your reference list directly within your .tex file:
Please contact latex@plos.org if you encounter any issues and be sure to include your manuscript files.
