SELECTING THE TOPICS FOR YOUR TERM PAPERS
When writing your term papers, always decide early and start the work. This allows for mistakes, adjusting your term paper topic, time to get information from other sources that take longer to obtain. It allows to critically analyze the information and to produce an original term paper from the information you have gathered.

GROUNDWORK FOR YOUR TERM PAPERS:
Do some preliminary reading to make sure you understand your term paper topic, and to get some idea of the amount of information regarding the term paper available to you. Insufficient or overwhelming amounts of information are both good reasons to abandon or alter your term paper topic.

TAPERING YOUR TERM PAPER TOPIC:
Make sure your term paper topic is narrow enough so that you can thoroughly research and analyze it, and to arrive at your own conclusions. A term paper topic that is not narrowed enough will result in a term paper, which is disunified collection of facts that is insufficiently critical, and is too general in its conclusions.

OUTLINE OF YOUR TERM PAPERS:
Prepare a working outline of the major headings for your term paper from the information you have gathered so far. Derive from this the points you intend to address or the questions that you will answer. This will serve as a guide for the gathering of your information resources, and keep you on the term paper topic as you do your research.

COLLECTING THE INFORMATION:
PRIMARY SOURCES FOR YOUR TERM PAPERS: - For writing your term papers, present new information, original research, or discuss known information in a new light. Academic journal articles, technical and government term reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, patents, standards, etc. are examples of such sources.

SECONDARY SOURCES FOR YOUR TERM PAPERS: - For gathering the secondary resources for your term papers, compile them from primary sources, usually to review the knowledge in the area, or to distil it into a convenient form.
Some of these sources are reviewed below:
USING ENCYCLOPEDIAS FOR WRITING TERM PAPERS:
Encyclopedias provide review articles on general topics. But the information is usually years out of date and are secondary sources of information - the result of someone else's research. Their usefulness lies primarily as sources of background information and for preliminary reading. Encyclopedias sometimes publish yearbooks which attempt to update the information.

USING BOOKS FOR WRITING TERM PAPERS
When using book for writing term papers keep in mind that books are usually two or more years out of date when published, and are typically secondary sources of information. Don't just look for books specifically on your term paper topic! Other useful information can be found in books on more general topics.

REFERRING PERIODICALS FOR WRITING TERM PAPERS
Periodicals can provide a good reference for writing term papers. Periodicals include such resources as magazines, journals, and newspapers. Articles found in them can provide you with both primary and secondary sources of information for your term papers. They usually cover topics that are narrower in scope.

MAGAZINE INDEXES AND ABSTRACTS FOR TERM PAPERS
To find articles on your term paper topic you must use magazine Indexes and Abstracts. These list and index (by author, title, subject, etc.) the articles published in selected magazines within a prescribed discipline or field. Abstracts have a short summary of the articles in addition to the indexes already mentioned. (Save yourself a lot of time and frustration by asking a Library staff member how to use them.)

WRITING BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YOUR TERM PAPER:
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to write a term paper and finding that you are missing the citations to the sources you have used! As you do your research, compile a working bibliography of the sources you consult which you can keep or discard for the formal bibliography.
There are many formats you can use for citing sources in a bibliography. Whatever you use, be consistent!