Successful academic writing requires identifying different positions within your discipline and contributing to the conversation. Participation requires knowing what the other participants are talking about. Although the specifics are different across disciplines, this guide outlines several techniques and resources that will help focus your search.

As you research, you will want to keep track of all the information you are finding. One way to do this is to use a citation management program like Zotero or EndNote. Citation management programs let you store, retrieve and organize your citations. There are a couple of free programs you may wish to try out before committing to an expensive software purchase:

The Graduate School

• Graduate Writing Center
  The Graduate Writing Center is open for appointments from week two of each term through finals week.

Writing & Research Guides

• Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL)

Citation Builders  

• UNC Libraries Online Citation Builder