LaTeX is a typesetting system widely used in academic and scientific writing.
Unlike Word, you write plain text with markup commands, and LaTeX handles all the formatting.
(Equations, citations, figure numbering, section headers, and page layout are all taken care of automatically.)
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Most journals and conferences (IEEE, ACM, arXiv, Springer, Nature) provide official LaTeX templates, so if you start in LaTeX from day one, you will save yourself a lot of painful reformatting later (speaking from experience :P).
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You do not need to install anything to get started, and there are two free browser-based options that are worth knowing about.
Overleaf is the most widely used online LaTeX editor. It has a large template library, real-time PDF preview, and straightforward collaboration.
Prism is a newer LaTeX editor by OpenAI.
Prism has, however, fewer templates and fewer advanced settings compared to Overleaf, and some features are still being developed. For most high school and undergraduate research papers, though, its features are sufficient.
If you are writing solo or just learning, either works fine. If you are co-writing a paper with labmates or need to compile a long document repeatedly, Prism is worth trying.
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Prism is designed to help you polish and refine what you have already written. It will not write your paper for you, and you should always verify any AI suggestions before accepting them, especially for citations and scientific claims.
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LaTeX documents typically follow the same skeleton:
\documentclass sets the document type.
article for general research papers.
report for longer documents like theses.
Everything before \begin{document} is called the preamble and is where you load packages and set document-level settings. Sections and subsections are numbered automatically, and the table of contents (if you add one) updates itself.
To add a table of contents, put \tableofcontents right after \maketitle. (LaTeX will fill it in on its own.)