As a college student, regardless of whether you’re an English major, a math major, a history major, or an engineering major, you’ll be writing a lot of papers. Some of these papers will be short, only one or two pages. Others will be longer; it’s not uncommon for senior these to be twenty pages or longer. And because you’ll be writing so many papers, you can count on spending a long time at your computer writing them. Below, you’ll find a list of websites that you should visit while you’re slaving away in front of your monitor.

Bibme.org–Bibme is one of the best bibliography creation sites out there. Unless you want to memorize or read and re-read the guidelines for writing bibliographies by hand, bookmark this site and use it often. All you need to do is enter some information about your source (sometimes even just the title), and Bibme will spit out a citation in any style you’d like.

The OWL at Purdue–Purdue’s Online Writing Lab is a great source of all types of information. This site will provide you with citation styles, recommendations for writing a thesis statement, tips for avoiding plagiarism, and a number of other useful resources. Because it’s maintained by Purdue, an academically rigorous university, you can be sure that the advice offered is sound.

Wikipedia–yes, I know that Wikipedia is not an acceptable academic source. I’m not suggesting that you use cite information that you get on Wikipedia. But just because you can’t use it as a source doesn’t mean that it’s not useful. If you look up the topic that you’re researching on Wikipedia, you can scan the article for related topics. Wikipedia does a great job of linking many topics together; once you’ve created a list of potentially interesting related issues, you can do some research on more academically acceptable sources.

Scholarly journal databases—depending on your university, you’ll have access to different databases. Examples are JournalSeek, JSTOR, and SPORTDiscus. The different databases hold information from different types of scholarly journals, so you’ll have to do some looking around for the information you need. Scholarly, peer-reviewed journals are the gold standard of paper sources, so expect to spend a lot of time looking around these databases.

YouTube–face it; if you’re going to be writing papers for hours and hours, you’ll need some sort of distraction. Whether it’s YouTube, CollegeHumor, or EBaum’s World, plan on taking some regular five- or ten-minute breaks every hour or so to give your brain a break. Humorous sites are great for this, because few of them require much thought, and they allow you to sit back and relax while you’re resting your intellectual faculties.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or funny stories you'd like me to share about college or the blog, email me at stu@stuvu.com