Homework 7

Due: Mar 8 by 11:59 pm eastern standard time

Submit your source file (paper.md or paper.tex), your refs.bib file, and the compiled PDF to Brightspace/OWL.

Background

You have been given a Word document (convert_this.docx) containing a short scientific paper about sleep restriction and postural sway. It’s the kind of document a student might produce in Word: functional, but fragile.

Open it in Word, LibreOffice, or Google Docs and take a look. Then examine it critically. You’ll notice several problems that are typical of Word-based scientific writing:

  • Headings are faked with bold/large text rather than structural heading styles
  • Citations are manually typed strings, not linked to a reference manager
  • The equation is typed as plain monospaced text, not a real equation
  • The reference list is typed by hand with inconsistent formatting across entries (some have DOIs, some don’t; one uses Vancouver style instead of APA; one is missing the hanging indent; one is missing a period)
  • The table uses heavy gridlines rather than clean formatting

None of these would survive a format change, a journal resubmission, or the passage of time particularly well.

Your Task

Recreate this document, either in Markdown+Pandoc, or in LaTeX (your choice), fixing all of the problems above along the way.

Specifically, your converted document must include:

1. Proper structure

  • Use real headings (# / ## in Markdown, or \section{} / \subsection{} in LaTeX)
  • Include YAML metadata (Markdown) or a proper preamble (LaTeX) with title, author, and date

2. Real citations and bibliography

  • Create a refs.bib file containing all five references from the paper
  • Replace every manually typed citation with a proper citation key (e.g., [@cappuccio2010sleep] in Markdown or \citep{cappuccio2010sleep} in LaTeX)
  • The bibliography should be generated automatically in APA format

Tip: You can find BibTeX entries on Google Scholar → click Cite → click BibTeX. Or search for the paper on https://scholar.google.com and export the entry.

3. Proper equations

Replace the plain-text equation with real LaTeX math. The document contains:

  • Cohen’s d (display equation)
  • The pooled standard deviation formula (inline)

These should become something like:

$$d = \frac{M_1 - M_2}{SD_{\text{pooled}}}$$

and

$SD_{\text{pooled}} = \sqrt{\frac{SD_1^2 + SD_2^2}{2}}$

4. A clean table

Recreate the results table using proper markup:

  • In Markdown: a pipe table with a caption
  • In LaTeX: a tabular inside a table environment with booktabs rules (\toprule, \midrule, \bottomrule — no vertical lines)

5. Compile to PDF

  • Markdown: pandoc paper.md --citeproc -o paper.pdf
  • LaTeX: latexmk -pdf paper.tex

What to Submit

  1. Your source file (paper.md or paper.tex)
  2. Your bibliography file (refs.bib)
  3. Your compiled output (paper.pdf)

Grading

This is a completion-based assignment. Full marks if:

Hints

  • You do not need to match the Word document’s appearance exactly. The point is to produce a better version using plaintext tools.
  • If using Markdown+Pandoc, remember to include --citeproc and to specify bibliography: refs.bib and csl: apa.csl in your YAML header.
  • If using LaTeX, biblatex with biber and style=apa will handle APA formatting.
  • The APA CSL file can be downloaded from https://www.zotero.org/styles/apa.
  • If you are skilled with these kinds of tools this assignment should take you about 15 minutes. If you’re spending much longer, ask for help. If you haven’t read through the course notes on (plaintext authoring) and completed the exercises, do that first.