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Students & Post-Secondary Planning

Essay Help

  • Ad Fontes Media - Reliability and bias ratings for numerous news sources, articles, television programs, and podcasts.
  • AllSides - Actively works to help you to understand the role media bias plays in the news and information you consume, as well as how to combat bias.
  • Cambridge Dictionary OnlineCambridge Dictionary Online, opens a new window - Find definitions for those tricky words!
  • Easy Bib - Generate citations in MLA, APA & Chicago formats for your bibliography.
  • Essay Info - Help with essay planning, structure, and basic writing. Has information on types of essays, presentation writing, business writing, and scholarships.
  • Essay Writing Center - Help with essay planning, structure, and basic writing. Has information on types of essays, presentation writing, business writing, and scholarships.
  • Evaluating Information Sources (UBC) - This guide will help you to evaluate resources you use for research, whether it is an online or print journal article, a website, a book, a newspaper article, or other source that you want to cite.
  • GradeSaver - Excellent essay editing and literature studies resources.
  • Lexico Dictionary (Powered by Oxford) - Oxford English and Spanish dictionary, thesaurus, and Spanish to English translator. Includes tips for learning English as a second language.
  • MediaBias - There's no such thing as unbiased news. But hidden media bias misleads, manipulates and divides us. AllSides empowers you to understand the role media bias plays in the news and information you consume.
  • Plagiarism - Plagiarism is a common (and often misunderstood) problem that is often the result of a lack of knowledge and skills. Learn what plagiarism is and how to avoid it with a comprehensive set of resources to help students write with integrity.
  • SparkNotes Guides- Summaries and insightful critical analyses of English literature, including Shakespeare, along with guides for history, math, biology, and other subjects.
  • Thesaurus Online, opens a new window - Easily searchable online thesaurus to help spice up your writing.
  • Write a Bibliography - from WikiHow.

Research Starting Places - a sample

  • Google Scholar - Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, all from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites.
  • Points to the Past - A collection of over 200 million pages of digitized historical documents made available by Cengage and three BC Universities. Any British Columbian connected to the internet in BC has barrier-free access to these primary sources.
  • ProQuest - Search nearly five-million digitized pages of news, ads, images and more that showcase BC’s heritage, accessing 125+ years of news archives of The Province (1894-2010), The Times Colonist (1884-2010), and The Vancouver Sun (1912-2010). This online access is made possible through a collaboration of academic, public, and school libraries across BC.
  • Public Library of Science - Journals - PLOS publishes a suite of influential Open Access journals across all areas of science and medicine. Rigorously reported, peer reviewed, and immediately available without restrictions, promoting the widest readership and impact possible.
  • PubMed Central - A free, full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) with contributions from professionals world-wide.

Post-Secondary Planning


Study Tips (SFU)


Health & Help

  • Here2Talk - connects students with mental health support when they need it. Through this program, all students – domestic or international – currently registered in a B.C. post-secondary institution have access to free, confidential counselling and community referral services, conveniently available 24/7 via app, phone and web.
  • Mental Health Literacy - Mental health is part of overall health. Just like it’s important to be informed about your health, it’s equally important to be informed about your mental health. Mental Health Literacy aims to take the best available scientific evidence in mental health and make it easy to understand and accessible for everyone.