Essential Resources for Students in 2022

Once you’ve received a place in higher education, whether at college or university, it can feel like a non-stop ride until your degree is achieved.

Students should use all available resources to increase their chances of success. Paid and non-paid resources exist that can ease your life as a student, ranging from high-quality professional proofreading services (to polish your writing for presentation) to reference management software (to help make the creation of bibliographies significantly easier).

For the upcoming year of 2022, an important trend is digitalisation and the growing inclusion of technology in higher education. Therefore, many of the essential resources for students in 2022 are digital tools, but not all of them; in fact, some key resources – such as professional proofreading – are human-driven tasks that, currently, computers perform quite badly at!

Read on to find out more about the three most essential resources for students in 2022.

 

1. Google Scholar

Released initially in November 2004, Google Scholar has emerged as one of the most valuable resources for academic research, literature reviews, and student assignments.

The purpose of Google Scholar is to offer an easilyaccessible – and freely available – web search engine that contains a vast database of full-text scholarly literature (or associated metadata), valuably covering a range of disciplines and publishing formats (e.g., journal articles and grey literature).

If you combine the use of Google Scholar (in your web browser, such as Chrome or Safari) with the use of a browser plug-in reference manager (discussed in Point 2 below), students can rapidly increase their ability to retrieve and cite the information they need.

 

2. Reference Managers

The purpose of a reference manager is to keep a record of all your journal articles, papers, and studies that you want to cite in your writing.

Using a reference manager, you can easily auto-generate reference lists conforming to a specific style guide (e.g., APA). Importantly, as a student or academic, this can save a lot of time and effort when creating bibliographies.

Reference managers are not a new development in 2021 and 2022; indeed, they’ve been around for a long time. Notably, with every year that has passed, they have been improving in leaps and bounds.

For example, Zotero, which is a long-running, free reference manager, is currently on version 5.0, and it offers many high-powered features compared to earlier versions.

 

3. Professional Proofreading Services

The final essential resource for students in 2022 that is worthy of mention in this article is professional proofreading.

As discussed in the introduction to this article, proofreading is not a task that computers can complete effectively and reliably today, which is unlike Google Scholar and reference managers; in both of these cases, computers outperform humans by a long stretch.

Dissimilarly, for professional proofreading, it is important to hire an experienced proofreader who can improve your work. Although this takes some effort, you can still use digital resources – such as the Internet, search engines, and review aggregation websites – to find a worthwhile service that suits your needs!