Scientific Writing
How to Reference Supplementary Material in Overleaf
TL;DR: you need to include the suppelementary material’s
output.auxfile in the project, then you can reference figures as if they are in the main file
Overleaf makes working collaboratively on a scientific manuscript a breeze and popular journals, such as AGU, even have an official template.
If you have used overleaf to write a manuscript, then you have probably struggled with referencing your supplementary material in your main text. It is non-trivial how to do this in overleaf, which is why I am outlining the steps here.
Steps to reference supplementary material
- After you compile your supplementary material, click on the
logs and output filesbetweenrecompileanddownload PDF
2. After that, click on other logs and files in the bottom right
3. This will bring up a box with different files. Click on output.aux and save this file somewhere on your computer
4. Rename output.aux to the same name as your supplementary file. For example, if your supplementary material is in supplementary.tex then name the aux file supplementary.aux
5. Copy this aux file into your overleaf project
6. Now you can start referencing supplementary figures in the main file.
Keep in mind that if you change the supplementary file, such as adding a new figure, then you will have to replace the aux file.
