Collaborating on a paper

Once you are comfortable with creating commits, working in branches, and merging branches, you can use these skills to write papers collaboratively as a team. This approach is particularly useful if you are writing a paper in LaTeX.

Here are some general guidelines that you may find useful:

• Divide the paper into separate LaTeX files for each section.

• Use tags to identify milestones such as draft versions and revisions.

• Consider creating a separate branch for each collaborator.

  • Merge these branches when completing a major draft or revision.

• Use latexdiff to show tracked changes between the current version and a previous commit/tag:

  latexdiff-git --flatten -r tag-name paper.tex
  

• Collaborators who will provide feedback, rather than contributing directly to the writing process, can do this by:

• Annotating PDF versions of the paper; or

• Providing comments in response to a merge/pull request.