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One issue that many students have expressed concern over or had difficulty with is researching (and then referencing) at the college or university level. Actually, this should be one of your easiest tasks. All colleges and universities today (I should not say all but certainly most) offer some type of online library service. Within this online library service these colleges and universities will usually subscribe to an existing database of scholarly and academic publications as well as databases of general publications. These databases are your friend. One of the most common academic and professional databases is EBSCO which has a series of professional databases including primarily business and psychological/sociological oriented databases. Some of the other more common journal databases is Sage Publications, Emerald, Jones, Proquest, Thompson-Gale, and LexisNexis Academic. While LexisNexis is one of the largest and most comprehensive research databases in terms of breadth and scope, its academic databases actually is not very good. All the other ones are fairly equal although I will use Proquest more for psychology/sociology references while EBSCO seems best for business related topics. So, now that you know what all those library services are, what do you do with the databases?

These research databases can be used in a multitude of ways. Obviously, the first method is to obtain articles for researching your academic or professional research projects. These articles can be read right on the site or downloaded for storing and viewing later. Additionally, there are a host of tricks that can be employed to make the researching and writing process even easier and quicker. For example, one trick (this is intended for shorter essays and projects) is to use the keyword search for your topic in the databases. Most of these research databases then come up with a list of articles and papers that match your description parameters with the corresponding abstracts. Since most research papers and essays that are less than 10 pages or so only require reference to concepts and ideas that are generally those discussed in the abstract, you can actually write your entire paper utilizing these abstracts.

In terms of the entire composition process, researching and then referencing that research is probably the most critical component of college or university writing and composition after the actual writing effort. Yet, on some level, it is even more important than the writing process because if you have done insufficient research or your research sources are poor or not sufficiently academic (peer reviewed), then it won't matter how well written your academic project is, you will only receive a mediocre grade at best or, at worst, fail. All of these issues lead you to say: "But what does all this mean and why can't I just write what I think?" The answer is that it is the process that is important and that is considered the nexus of the US and, to some extent, Western education. I say to some extent because the system of education in the UK and in other commonwealth markets such as Australia and similar, are somewhat different. In the UK and related academic circles the tutor system is employed and this system radically affects the research and writing process in some respects and in North America (I say North America because Canada largely employs the US model in that many Canadian institutions have gotten away from the tutor system) the education system almost exclusively relies on departmental instructors and largely professional instructors in a group environment. This system of education is that employed within the Ivy League colleges in the US such as Harvard and Yale and has gone on to influence almost every US college and university. It employs a triumvirate system of topical discussion, focussed assignments, and then research and composition of related papers.