The LaTeX command \maketitle destroys itself once its work is done. The instant the title block is set, \maketitle, \title, \author and \date are all replaced by commands that do nothing — that is not a metaphor, it is what the article class definition says. As a result a second \maketitle gives no reaction at all, and a \title{A New Title} written after \maketitle raises no error but pours that string into the body text. This page takes that one-shot design as its thread and works through \title, \author, \date, \thanks and \and, the classes in which the abstract environment exists and the one in which it does not, and the titlepage option that gives you a separate cover page.
Declare first: \title, \author, \date
All three merely store information; nothing at all is printed where you write them. Hand a title to \title{...}, author names to \author{...} and a date to \date{...}, and each is filed away internally; the moment anything reaches the page is when \maketitle is called, further down. Convention puts these in the preamble, before \begin{document}, but they work anywhere so long as they come before \maketitle. This two-step, declare-then-set arrangement is what lets the title appear at the front of the document while the same information stays available elsewhere — running heads, PDF bookmarks, and so on.
Of the three, only \title is compulsory. Leave it out and the run stops with ! LaTeX Error: No \title given. Leaving out \author does not stop anything: you get only the warning LaTeX Warning: No \author given. and typesetting continues, so it goes unnoticed unless you read the log. The default for \date deserves care. If you do not write it, the date you compiled on is filled in automatically, because LaTeX initialises its internal \@date to \today from the start — which means the date shifts every time you put the draft down and recompile later. To print no date at all, give empty contents with \date{}; to pin a version, write a literal such as \date{30 May 2026}. Spelling out \today is for drafts where “whatever today is” is genuinely what you want.
\documentclass{article}
\title{Measuring heat flux with everyday materials}
\author{Ada Lovelace}
\date{30 May 2026} % omit this line entirely and you get the compile date
\begin{document}
\maketitle
The body starts here.
\end{document}\maketitle fires once: why the second call does nothing
Once \maketitle has set the information it was given, it clears away both itself and its materials. The end of the article class definition holds a run of lines that replace \maketitle itself, along with \title, \author, \date, \and and \thanks, by commands that do nothing. Two consequences follow. First, a second \maketitle produces no error, no warning and no output. The second is nastier: write \title{A New Title} after \maketitle and the neutralised \title passes by without taking an argument, leaving {A New Title} to be typeset as ordinary body text. That is the true identity of the symptom “I edited the title and nothing changed — and now there is a stray phrase in my text”. Keep every declaration ahead of \maketitle.
Convention puts the call immediately after \begin{document}, and that is more than mere habit. In article, \maketitle runs \newpage before it sets anything, so placing it after a few lines of body text breaks the page there and puts the title at the top of the next one. Call it at the very start of the document and nothing has been typeset yet, so the page break is invisible and you never notice the behaviour. What ultimately decides where things land is the document class: article by default starts no new page and puts the title at the top of page one, while report and book default to a separate, unnumbered title page. If you want to adjust the fine appearance, Peter Wilson's titling package provides the tools for fonts, placement and the handling of \thanks.
Several authors with \and, footnotes with \thanks
Inside \author, \\ means “next line, same author” and \and means “next author”. The surest way never to mix them up is to learn what \and actually is. In LaTeX's definition it is nothing but \end{tabular} followed by \begin{tabular}[t]{c}, with a slightly stretchable gap wedged between them. The author block, in other words, is a one-column centred table all along: \\ advances a row of that table, while \and closes the table and stands a fresh one up beside it. That is exactly why an affiliation hangs below the name when you use \\, and why authors sit side by side when you use \and — the visible result and the definition agree perfectly.
To turn an affiliation, a contact address or a funding acknowledgement into a footnote, put \thanks{...} inside \title or \author. There is a trick here too. An ordinary \footnote does not behave inside tabular material, but \thanks places only the footnote mark on the spot, stores the note text in a separate holder, and pours all of them out once the title block has been set. That is what makes it safe to use from inside the author table. As a convenience, \footnote is read as \thanks within \maketitle, so writing \footnote there by mistake gives the same result.
The look of the resulting footnotes follows its own logic in the standard classes. The marks \thanks attaches are not digits but ∗, †, ‡, § and so on, and the footnote counter is reset to zero once the title block has been set. So the first \footnote in your body text confidently starts at “1”. That is why an acknowledgement on the title and the first note of the body never collide over the same “1”. Read the other way, if a submission style demands numerals throughout, you now know there are two tiers to reconcile before reaching for titling or a similar tool.
| Command | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
\title{...} | Declares the title (required) | Omitting it gives ! LaTeX Error: No \title given.; \\ and \thanks work inside |
\author{...} | Declares the authors (optional) | Omitting it only warns, LaTeX Warning: No \author given., and continues |
\date{...} | Declares the date (optional) | Omitted = compile date; \date{} = no date; a literal = a pinned version |
\and | Separates authors inside \author | Internally it closes one table and stands another beside it; \\ breaks lines within one author |
\thanks{...} | Makes a footnote inside \title or \author | Marks are ∗, †, ‡, §; the footnote counter is reset afterwards |
\maketitle | Actually typesets the declared information | One shot only: a second call does nothing, and \title and friends then spill into the body |
Which classes have the abstract environment
The abstract environment exists in article and report, but not in book. “Not in” does not mean “styled differently” — it genuinely is not defined, and writing \begin{abstract} under book produces ! LaTeX Error: Environment abstract undefined. Because an undefined environment still opens its group, that is followed by ! LaTeX Error: \begin{document} ended by \end{abstract}. as well. The gap reflects the convention that books do not carry abstracts, but typesetting a thesis with book and needing a summary page is an entirely ordinary situation. When it arises, load the abstract package or set the summary page yourself.
The standard place is immediately after \maketitle, before the body begins. How it looks then splits three ways. In one-column article you get a small centred “Abstract” heading with the text indented from both sides like a quotation. Switch to two columns and the behaviour changes: it is treated like a \section* and fits inside a single column — a great many people hit this when a paper wants the abstract spanning the full page width, and the answer there is the optional argument of \twocolumn, or the abstract package. And because report is a class that makes a title page by default, its abstract is set as a page of its own. The heading word itself is \abstractname, so switching the document language with babel or a similar package switches the word too.
A cover page of its own: the titlepage option and the titlepage environment
The name titlepage wears two hats: a class option and an environment. Write \documentclass[titlepage]{article} and \maketitle sets the title inside a titlepage environment, producing a separate, unnumbered cover page. report and book have this as their default from the start, so no option is needed there — and if you want article's behaviour instead, pass notitlepage. The option also changes how the abstract appears: when titlepage is in force, the very definition of the abstract environment is swapped, and the abstract becomes a dedicated page of its own, centred vertically. For a submission that wants the cover and the summary on separate pages, that single word often satisfies the requirement outright.
The other hat, the titlepage environment, is a container for building a cover page entirely by hand without \maketitle. Its contents are ordinary LaTeX, so you may put a logo in it or draw rules across it. The trade-off is that the link to whatever you stored in \title is severed. That is exactly where the accident of submitting a cover page whose title disagrees with \title comes from, so if you hand-build a cover, decide up front to keep the information in one place only.
Everything pulled together
The \title carries a funding acknowledgement through \thanks; the \author separates two authors with \and, hangs each affiliation under the name with \\, and footnotes one author's email with \thanks. The \date is pinned as a fixed version, and an abstract environment follows immediately after \maketitle. Set, it comes out as a large title with the two authors side by side beneath it and the date below that; the title and one author carry the marks ∗ and †, and the acknowledgement and email line up at the foot of the page. Under them sit the “Abstract” heading and the summary paragraph, and then the body opens with “1 Introduction”.
\documentclass{article}
\title{Measuring heat flux with everyday materials%
\thanks{Supported by the Example Foundation.}}
\author{
Ada Lovelace\thanks{[email protected]} \\
Analytical Engine Laboratory
\and
Alan Turing \\
National Physical Laboratory
}
\date{30 May 2026}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{abstract}
This paper describes a procedure for measuring heat flux with
readily available materials, and discusses the treatment of error.
\end{abstract}
\section{Introduction}
The body starts here.
\end{document}The checks worth making before you submit
The title area is the last thing you touch after the body is finished, which makes it the easiest thing to break right before a deadline. The first thing to check is whether the submission rules or the assignment fix the class for you. If a class is prescribed, feeding the information to the commands that class provides is plainly safer than reshaping the output of \maketitle by hand. Conference and graduate-school templates often carry their own declarations for the cover — \studentid, \supervisor and the like — and the moment you revert to a plain \maketitle, the information the review process needs drops out.
- Title — if a long title has to break, put
\\only at a semantic boundary, never inside a word or a formula. - Authors — keep names and affiliations in
\author, moving only genuine footnote material to\thanks, and do not confuse\\with\and. - Date — write a literal date for a submission whose version is fixed; reserve
\todayfor drafts whose date may change. - Abstract — state purpose, method, result and conclusion briefly, without stuffing in abbreviations or notation the body has not yet introduced.
- Last look — check that no
\titleor\authoris left after\maketitle; if one is, its contents are printed straight into the body.