Mastering Google Docs for Writing Academic Papers

Google Docs is the most powerful, versatile and fast word editor, but publishing a scientific paper with its formatting and citing requirements, tables, and figures requires plugins and a good strategy. In this tutorial, you will learn all the plugins and hacks you need to make Google Docs the perfect tool for writing a paper with co-authors.

Say goodbye to emailing endless Word documents with yet another “final” in their title and switch to Google Docs. It’s clean, powerful and easy to use. Here are the main problems we want to solve:

1. Structure your paper and keep track of progress for each section individually
2. Configure Google Docs to find sections faster (with one click) and scroll easier.
3. Setup a system to automatically number figures, tables and equations.
4. Add a system of links to refer to figures tables and links that auto updates when the order changes.
5. Incorporate figure numbers from supplementary materials (separate document)
6. Use add-ons for reference management and finding typos
7. Make your documents beautiful and professional.
8. Learn to save versions of the document before making journal-specific changes without creating a copy.
9. Using Google Docs for collaborative writing.

Before you begin it is best to have your literature and notes ready, this will greatly speed up the process. Check out the Literature Review and Note Taking Courses for more info.

Setting up your Document

To begin writing create two documents one for the main text and one for the supplementary materials. Always use Heading 1 for the main chapters of your document, such as Introduction, Methods, Results, and Headings 2, 3, and 4 as needed.

Choose a font size that is good to work with and also looks good when exporting. As a web designer in my previous life I know that picking the right fonts and sizes is more than just about the design, it is about the perception of your paper. A paper without typos and set in beautiful fonts emanates professionalism and completion. This will help your ideas to be perceived in a good light and taken more seriously. So spend a few minutes on adjusting fonts (Open Sans is often a great choice), line height (1.5x – 2x is optimal) and padding. This X thread has more informaiton.

Draft Versions: The key to structure

One of the biggest challenges in writing a paper is keeping track of what part of the document needs, what works, and from whom. I found that drop-downs are the perfect solution for this as they allow to annotate at which state a paragraph is in, e.g. “first draft”, “waiting for feedback”, “completed”. The best solution is to use a numbering system: version 1,2,3… Whenever significant changes are made to a paragraph, you increase the version. Before publishing, all paragraphs must be at the highest level to ensure you went through all parts of the document and everything is in harmony.

The options selectable in a drop-down menu can be added and removed by clicking the “add/edit options button,” and you can create any structure you need to organize yourself. Essentially, this is similar to a Kanban board, where each “task” is in a “column” indicating its current progress. Here, the tasks are paragraphs, and the column is the value of the drop-down menu.

Here is how to edit and work with dropdowns:

Combined with the folding of headings, you can get a perfect overview of the entire paper, as shown in the video.

Folding, Table of Contents and Pageless Mode for Navigation

Another issue is often the size of the document. If you are looking for a specific passage, you end up scrolling, which takes up too much time and disturbs your focus. My solution to this is twofold:

1. Turn on pageless mode, which cuts the length of the document by at least 50%.
2. Collapse or fold the parts of the paper you are not working on
3. Use the table of contents menu to reach any heading in one click.

These three methods combined make your navigation inside the document effortless and, most importantly, pleasant.

Using Pageless Format

Go to Format > Switch to Pageless Format to turn on this feature. In the video below, you can observe how I scroll through the document at twice the speed I did after switching to the pageless format.

If you want things to go even faster, you can set the width of the text to fit more text onto the screen. However, you will need to export your Google document to a Word or PDF with pages before submission, and you, therefore, need to keep the size of the figures and tables to the width of a single page or resize all your figures and tables later (this is a total pain, don’t do this). Notice in the screenshot below that I limited the size of the diagram to be narrow, even though the text is very wide. If I had not done it and just exported it to a Word document, all my figures would not fit onto the pages, and the document would have been broken.

The pageless format is much more comfortable and fast to work with. To avoid any problems later on, make a first mini-draft of your paper and try to export it to docx or pdf. Ensure everything looks fine, as the export might look slightly different after turning on the pageless format.

Collapsing or Folding Headings

Consistently use hierarchic headings in your document. This allows you to collapse/hide/fold everything below a heading up to the next one and hide the parts of the document that are irrelevant, finished or unimportant. Here is how folding works:

Headings are numbered. Heading 1 is the largest, 2 is a subheading, 3 is a sub-subheading and so on. This is equivalent to a typical hierarchic numbering of “Chapter 1” (→ Heading 1), “Chapter 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 …” (→ Heading 2) and so on. Reserve Heading 1 for the main structure of your paper like the typical “Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion” and use sub headings as you see fit. Folding a bigger heading will hide all subheadings as well.

Using the Table of Contents

Another benefit of consistently using headings is the automated table of contents that Google Docs generates for you. Click the button at the top left to show it. If you do not see the button, you must first activate this feature by going to View > Show Outline. Here is how it looks.

Table of Contents allows you to navigate different parts of the document with one click. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to number your headings automatically. The chapter numbers you see in the video are manually typed in. Start by outlining the structure of your paper first to avoid frequently changing or adding numbers to your headings.

Extending Google Docs’ Academic Capabilities with Add-Ons

Google Docs lacks a few features right out of the box. Most importantly for academics, this is the automatic numbering of figures and management of references. Two extensions will take care of this: “Cross Reference” and “Paperpile”. Paperpile is a reference manager and, in my opinion, the best one if you are going to use Google Docs. Zotero is an alternative, but it is quite slow, and the references are not rendered as links, which makes it harder to spot them.

To install an Add-on or Extension, click “Extensions → Add-ons → Get add-ons“. Here is how it looks:

There are dozens of add-ons available, but most are not very relevant to academics. Let’s explore the two main add-ons we will need: Cross Reference and Paperpile.

Automatically Numbering Figures, Tables and Equations in Google Docs

Figures in the result shift around quite a lot, and renaming your figure numbers if they change their order is incredibly inconvenient. Instead you can use “Cross Reference” a Google Doc Extension that will do the numbering for you. Here is what it does:

Notice that the references to figures 1 and 2 in the text and their subtitles are automatically updated when I change the order of the two figures. Once you have six figures, this can save you time and avoid mistakes.

Step 1: Install the Cross Reference add-on

Install the add-on by opening “Extensions → Add-ons → Get add-ons“. Then search for “Cross Reference”. Hit the blue install button at the top right.

Once you have installed the add-on, open “Extensions → Cross Reference → Configure References“.

Step 2: Understanding how Cross Reference Numbers Figures

For Cross Reference to work properly, you will create links in a specific format inside your document. Once you hit the update button, Cross Reference recognizes these links, generates the automatic numbering and inserts these numbers into the link text. A link, strictly speaking, consists of the text and the address. The text is arbitrary, and the address defines where the link leads to but is not visible to the user. Cross Reference links all have the format #{code}_{name}. The code identifies one of two types of links: Labels (in the title of your figure) and References (inside the main text). The name is a unique name you will use for your figure; it stays the same even if you move the figure itself. Here is an overview:

Let’s sum up the steps you need to do:

1. First, open Cross Reference and select “Figure” at the top to determine which codes to use. The default codes are #figur for the label and #fig for references. These codes are not arbitrary, and you must use the ones displayed under Code in the Cross Reference sidebar.
2. Create a unique and simple name for your figure, e.g. “errors” in my case. This gives you the links to use #figur_errors for the label and #fig_errors for the references, respectively.
3. Under the figure, create a caption starting with “Figure….” Select “Figure,” right-click to create a link (or use the CMD/Ctrl + K hotkey), and type in “#figur_errors.”
4. In the text where you want to refer to this figure, also type in “Figure A,” for example, and link the word “Figure” to “#fig_errors.”
5. Go to Extensions → Cross Reference → Update Document. This will take a few seconds, but the links to “Figure” will be replaced with the correct numbers.

The name “errors” in our case remains constant and is required so that Cross Reference knows which links belong together. The two types of links, Reference (#fig) and Label (#figur), are necessary since the order of labels defines the number of figures, while the order of references is irrelevant. Here is a demo video for the whole process (steps 2-5):

Once you understand how it works, the process becomes quite simple, even though it is not intuitive.

Step 2: Using Cross Reference for Tables or Equations

Once you understand how cross-reference works (it uses links with a specific code to figure out which numbers to assign to each one and changes the text in your document according to your naming and styling convention), you can guess that this method is applicable not only to figures but to any type of numbered content. Tables usually follow a separate order from figures and need their own code. The default codes are #table for the label and #tab for the references.

The same works for equations; you can create your own types by specifying the code. This last step is what we can use for supplementary material tables often abbreviated with an S (e.g. Fig S1).

Step 3: Automatically Numbering Supplementary Material Figures and Tables

Normally your supplementary materials reside in a separate document, while you can use Cross Reference in this document as well you will not be able to access it in your main document. If, like me, your supplementary materials grow into a second paper, any changes to it will force you to do extensive renumbering in the main document. Luckily, there is a trick to help with this.

Creating a Supplementary Figure Type

First you will need to create a new type in cross reference and call it “supplementary figure” for example. You can define a new code #supfi, for example, and set it up so that your figures automatically get an “S” added (e.g. Fig S2). The new type is necessary to differentiate between your main and supplementary figures. Here is how to do it:

You must do this step in both the supplementary materials document and your main document.

Adding a List of Supplementary Figures to the Bottom of Your Main Document

To get the numbering from your supplementary material into your main document, you will do a small hack: We will add the supplementary figure titles and links to the main document without copying the figures themselves. It is just a list of figures. Cross Reference will then think these supplementary figures are inside the main document while only the titles are included. I usually add this block to the bottom of my main document:

Notice that all the names are links, and the naming code is “#sfigu”. The order is the same as in the supplementary materials document. If I reorder my supplementary materials document, I must manually reorder this list. While this is done manually it only takes a moment to reorder these 10 lines, all links to these supplementary figures are done automatically (and there are dozens of them in my main document)! Right before publishing, you need to delete this block from your main document.

Adding Reference Managers to Google Docs

To manage references, you have a choice of reference managers. Most support Google Docs (except Mendeley does not), and some are easier to use than others. My choice is Paperpile. To use it properly, you need to install:

• Paperpile Google Doc Add-on
• Paperpile Browser Plugin

Using both together makes Paperpile the fastest citation manager and, in my opinion, more than makes up for a small 3$/mo price. Here is how the browser extension works:

Note that references end up as links in the document, making them easier to spot and edit. Paperpile does not create a bibliography when you add a reference. Instead, this is done manually before publication. Go to Extensions > Paperpile > Manage Citations to open a sidebar and hit the red button “Update Citations and Bibliography”. This will do two things:

1. It will add a bibliography to the bottom of the document
2. It will change the blue in-text references to the correct way of citing according to your document (which can be numbers [1] or names (Smith et al. 2020)). The citation style is set right above the red button.

You can also click the same red button again to remove the bibliography and transform the references back to the original paper pile links.

Using Grammarly for Corrections

Save yourself a lot of energy by installing the Grammarly Extension to correct your writing and typos, especially if English is not your first language. If you want a more academic writing assistant check out my tutorial on using Paperpal, which however does not support Google Docs yet. Here is what such a correction looks like (The text has already been edited with Grammarly, so there are only a few insignificant corrections here):

You will need to install the Chrome extension for the best results. The desktop version works well on a Mac, too, but it is much slower.

Using AI assistance to Write Papers

Aim at writing your paper yourself to avoid problems with journals. This being said you should use AI to help you polish parts of your writing and get ideas on how to structure your paper. Here is a guide on how to use AI for academic writing. If you want to learn everything about academic AI, check out the Effortless AI course:

Research papers with Co-Authors in Google Docs

Google Docs is a collaborative text editor. Unlike Word, you do not need to send copies of your document to all your collaborators. Invite them as editors to your document; everyone can work on it in real-time. I suggest asking them not to make edits but rather comment on your writing (if you are the first author) and let you incorporate their changes.

Click the big “share” button at the top right to add people. You will receive an email notification whenever someone comments on the document. To reduce the number of emails everyone receives, try outsourcing the conversation about the paper to the comments section of the document.

Do not let Co-authors edit your papers early on

Whoever is the first author of a paper should make the first few drafts of it. This ensures that the narrative is consistent and the paper is complete. To achieve this, the co-authors should be commenters instead of editors when sharing.

Asking for feedback early on, however, is useful. So encourage comments from your co-authors.

Suggestion mode for co-authors

Use the suggestion mode when letting co-authors modify the main text. This ensures that all edits are visible, and you can reject or accept these changes. This ensures that one person (you, the first author) always has an overview of the entire paper.

To make changes, you will have to give the co-authors the editor role. Click on share and change their permissions to “Editor”.

Assigning tasks via comments

Instead of sending emails with editing requests or questions, assign a comment with the task to the person(s) who will be dealing with the task. Comment on some passage and write “@” followed by the co-author’s email. You will see a popup when you type @. This gives your co-authors the ability to clear/remove the comment afterwards as well, so you don’t have to deal with it.

Mentioning and assigning someone in this way will send them an email, so you don’t need to mail them with your request explicitly. This keeps things tidy in your and their email inbox.

Critical steps before submitting your paper

If your paper is completed there are only a few more steps to do. Here is my list to ensure a smooth submission:

1. Create a named version before making any journal-specific formatting or edits
2. Switch back to a paged format and check tables and figures (see section on pageless format)
3. Create a bibliography (see section reference managers)
4. Enable line numbers
5. Close all comments

Automatic Backups with Version History

While you write Google Docs records, every edit allows you to return to this version. This is useful when, for example, your paper gets rejected by a journal, but you already made some changes to your main text specific to this journal. Roll back to the version before the edits, and you will be ready.

Versions are automatically named by date and time, but you can give important versions a clear text name, for example, “Pre-submission to GCB journal”. To do that, click on the three dots next to the version and select “Name this version” (see second 10 in the Video).

Enabling Line Numbers

Almost all peer-reviewed journals will ask you to include line numbers in your document. This is necessary for the reviewers to be able to review the exact locations in your first draft. Google Docs allows you to do this if you export the document as a Word doc (it does not work when exporting to PDF). You must disable pageless format to enable line numbers. After doing this click on “Tools → Line Numbers“. In the sidebar enable the line numbers.

Sometimes, the line numbers initially do not show up correctly (as in the video, as you might notice), but this resolves itself after you scroll up and down the document once.

Closing all Comments

Do not keep comments in your document; be ready to remove them for clarity and confidence when you publish. Each comment has a little checkmark to remove it permanently.

I tend to remove all comments that are older than a certain date and have not been addressed to keep the overview in the document.

Summary

In this tutorial I presented a few methods on how to make Google Docs a great publishing platform for academic work. In summary:

• Use the drop-downs to track the progress of each sub-chapter individually
• Use folding, pageless format and automatic table of contents to find things faster in your document.
• Use a reference manager like Paperpile to deal with references.
• Use the Cross Reference add-on to number your figures, tables and equations automatically
• Create a dummy list of supplementary figures in your main document to number these as well as automatically
• Use the comment function in Google Docs rather than sending versions of the document to co-authors.
• Before making journal-specific edits, save a named version of the document
• Before publishing, enable line numbers, remove comments, and switch back to page format.

Want to learn more on how to use technology to write papers faster and with more confidence? Then check out my note-taking course:

I hope these tips will help you in your academic journey.