AEA Submission Guide - ganong-noel/lab_manual GitHub Wiki

This is a guide for producing final paper materials for submission to AEA journals. The guide was produced by Xian with some minor edits from Pete.

References

AEA Style Guide for Accepted Papers

AEA LaTeX/native file templates

Instructions

For all of the following, defer to the AEA style guide if there are inconsistencies or missing information. The goal is to match the AEA submission requirements

  1. Create a new folder that will contain the native files for submission. Also create subdirectories for figures and tables. E.g, create /submit/, /submit/figs, /submit/tables
  2. Copy the AEA template files into the directory. This includes the aea.bst style for bibliographes, the AEA.cls file for the class, and the .tex file.
  3. Using a text editor or LaTeX editing environment (e..g TeXStudio, TeXShop), copy the contents of the exported file (excluding material not for publication such as online appendices) into the AEA template .tex file.
    1. Make necessary changes to the front matter for author names, acknowledgements, etc. Include a short title for the running header.
  4. Copy the figures and the tables into the template, using the figure and table environment examples in the template. Check that the files are “native files” which means that they should have extensions like “.tex” or “.pdf” rather than “.png”. You should be able to highlight text that appears in a native file (whereas you cannot in an image file).
    1. Remember to copy the correct captions, references, and notes for each exhibit
    2. Copy the necessary figures and tables into the appropriate subdirectory, and update the references in the LaTeX accordingly
    3. For figures whose sizes are defined as multiples of \textwidth in Overleaf, you might have to adjust their sizes in the AEA .tex file, to ensure that the figures fill the same amount of horizontal space as the main text whenever possible -- the margins of the AEA template might not be the same as those used in the default formatting in Overleaf
  5. Copy the .bib file to the /submit/ directory where the latex file is. Use the \bibliographystyle{aea} and \bibliography{bib_file_name.bib} commands after the main text to generate the bibliography
  6. The AEA only wants main text tables and figures, not the appendix. You might have trouble getting references (in the main text) to sections, figures, or tables in the appendix to show up. In order to get the references to work properly without actually having an appendix, compile the full document latex (copied from paper.tex on Overleaf, with appendices) to generate an .aux file, and follow the instructions at this stackexchange question.
    1. Once you've compiled the "with appendix" version, you can use your terminal/command line to run something like this: grep '\newlabel' paper_with_appendix.aux > labels_from_appendix.tex
    2. This will save a full list of labels (from both main text and appendix) in the labels_from_appendix.tex file, and then you can include those labels when compiling the "no appendix" version of the paper by adding \input{labels_from_appendix} in the preamble of the "no appendix" .tex file.