A 'report' from lots of 'article's

This is a requirement, for example, if one is preparing the proceedings of a conference whose papers were submitted in LaTeX.

The nearest thing to a canned solution is Peter Wilson's combine class; it defines the means to '\import' entire documents, and provides means of specifying significant features of the layout of the document, as well as a global table of contents, and so on. An auxiliary package, combinet, allows use of the \titles and \authors (etc.) of the \imported documents to appear in the global table of contents.

A more 'raw' toolkit is offered by Matt Swift's includex and moredefs packages, both part of the frankenstein bundle) offer a possible way forward.

Includex enables you to '\includedoc' complete articles (in the way that you '\include' chapter files in an ordinary report). It doesn't do the whole job for you, though. You need to analyse the package use of the individual papers, and ensure that a consistent set is loaded in the preamble of the main report.

A completely different approach is to use the pdfpages package, and to include articles submitted in PDF format into a a PDF document produced by PDFLaTeX. The package defines an \includepdf command, which takes arguments similar to those of the \includegraphics command. With keywords in the optional argument of the command, you can specify which pages you want to be included from the file named, and various details of the layout of the included pages.

combine.cls
macros/latex/contrib/supported/combine.tar.gz
combinet.sty
macros/latex/contrib/supported/combine.tar.gz
includex.sty
Distributed in the "unsupported" part of macros/latex/contrib/supported/frankenstein.tar.gz
moredefs.sty
Distributed as part of macros/latex/contrib/supported/frankenstein.tar.gz
pdfpages.sty
macros/latex/contrib/supported/pdfpages.tar.gz