Two things are often bothering when one starts to work with LaTeX: in text referencing of literature and Umlaute (for our German speaking friends) ****
Referencing: Here is a list of 5 types of in text referencing. To get them to work in a LaTeX file you need to define a referencing style in your document (in the example I use APA – American Psychological Association), you can of course use any style you want!
In the header:
usepackage{apacite}
bibliographystyle{apacite}
In the actual text part the command on the left results in the reference on the right:
cite{Bortz1993} – (Bortz, 1993)
citeA{Bortz1993} – Bortz (1993)
citeNP{Campbell1959} – Campbell, 1959
citeauthor{Spiel2001} – Spiel citeyearNP{Bortz1993} – 1993
At the end of the document enter a reference to your .bib file, in the example below my file is called biblio.bib: bibliography{biblio}
Umlaute: In German there are several Umlaute that are not included in the standard english setup of a LaTeX installation. There are two ways to get them right: 1) given a standard LaTeX document use (again command on the left, result on the right): “a – ä “u – ü “o – ö) given that you actually want to write in German do the following:
usepackage[german]{babel}
usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc}
Two useful links:
1) Wikipedia book on LaTeX http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
2) A page at the University of Salzburg’s Psychology department (German!)
Gernot Kleiter was the person who introduced me to LaTeX, decision making, good experimenting … actually, there should be a whole post about him …