Work in progress: The impact of using LATEX for academic writing: A Peruvian engineering students' perspective
Carlos Sotomayor-Beltran, Alan Leoncio Fierro Barriales, Juan Lara-Herrera · 2021
This study shows the benefits of using the typesetting software LATEX in research courses of two engineering programs from the Sciences and Humanities University (UCH) in Lima, Peru. In several universities worldwide, this software is used to write diverse types of academic documents (e.g., theses, scientific papers and books). Some of the many advantages of LATEX is the easiness of writing mathematical equations and also dealing with different citation styles such as APA, IEEE and Vancouver. Moreover, the documents produced with this software possess an impeccable professional layout. Thus, during the second semester of the year 2019 and the first semester of the year 2020, a group of systems and electronic engineering students from research courses at the UCH were introduced to LATEX and were surveyed to find out their perspectives with regards to the use of this software. By means of a self-administered questionnaire, a general consensus could be seen among the students that LATEX is far better to write academic documents than other typesetting software. Hence, starting the second semester of 2020 we have encouraged its use in other research courses and suggested as well to the head of the engineering department at the UCH to make use of this tool a compulsory one in all such courses.