Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium: guidelines for symposium paper and abstract writing

Submission process timeline (final deadline is Friday, August 30, 2024):

Send paper or abstract to your advisor (we recommend by Friday, August 2, 2024, to give time for feedback).

Your advisor signs off on the fully compiled paper or abstract and lets you know you can submit it (by Friday, August 30, 2024). They also fill out this Google form.

You also submit the PDF of your paper or abstract (by Friday, August 30, 2024) at this Google form.

KNAC participant authors and co-authors are kindly asked to fill out some demographic information at this Google Form.

Guidelines for choosing a talk or a poster:

Students who wish to give a talk on their research at the symposium need to write a short paper to be published in the proceedings of the symposium. This proceedings document has been published annually for over thirty years – ask your research advisor to show you some old editions. The paper must be submitted in PDF format, following the procedure below.

Students who wish to present a poster on their research at the symposium will submit only an abstract describing their work. The abstract must be submitted in PDF format, also following the procedure below.

Talk with your supervisor about if you should apply to give a talk or a poster.

Guidelines for submission length:

Student papers should be no more than five pages long (or, eight pages for papers by multiple students), including the bibliography and any figures and tables.

Student abstracts should be no more than one paragraph.

Guidelines for submission preparation:

We are using LaTeX for paper typesetting. LaTeX is a markup language with formatting commands and content separated (similar in concept in this sense to HTML). It handles equations and tables very well and includes images easily. It is the standard for published papers in the peer-reviewed literature (as well as many scientific and mathematical books).

You can probably figure out how to make or edit your LaTeX document simply by reading this short PDF document and the LaTeX file that was used to make it. You should use the online LaTeX editor, Overleaf, which both specifies and includes the image file and the KNAC style file. You don't have to worry about margins or the size of tab indentations or which font you use, for example.

With Overleaf you shouldn't need to download anything locally, and you'll be able to compile the LaTeX source file to create a final PDF from Overleaf itself.

Once you've read the example document, you can use Overleaf to open as template the LaTeX file, replacing its content with your own. Note the many tips and pieces of useful explanatory information in the example document (with more in comments in the LaTeX file itself). If you need more information, your advisor probably has a book or two on LaTeX and there is much information on-line (some of which is mentioned in the example document).

As an alternative to Overleaf, students can still download the single zip archive of the individual template files to a local machine, edit the LaTeX file, and compile their own PDF document to submit. This path is not recommended except for those already very familiar with LaTeX.

Important items to note about submission formatting:

Make sure that all your figures are legible and understandable to the reader when printed in black and white. This means that you should not refer to specific colors in plots in the captions or text, and that you should not use symbols that will look the same as each other in grayscale.

Do not use commands in the LaTeX file that change type sizes or margins (e.g. \scriptsize, \footnotesize, etc.). Just stick with the default type sizes provide by the style file. If you can't fit into the page limit when using those, the paper is too long.

Final submission instructions:

After having your advisor read your final paper, submit your paper PDF via the Google Form, and request that your advisor acknowledge their approval via the faculty approval form, following the links above. To make this process go as smoothly as possible, use the Overleaf template, consult with your advisor if you have any questions, and follow the guidelines above.

Questions/issues should be addressed to your advisor, or the Proceedings editors Prof. Karen Masters and Prof. Colette Salyk at .

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