Study guides for every major and every paper format

How the 600 study guides are organized

Every page in this library is a crossover: one of 50 majors crossed with one of 12 college paper formats. That matters because the same assignment changes shape between departments. A research paper in nursing leans on a PICOT question and an evidence hierarchy; the same research paper in history wants a historiographical stake and footnoted primary sources. Generic writing advice averages those differences away - these guides keep them.

There are two ways to navigate. If you know exactly what you are writing, use the explorer above: pick your major, pick the paper type, and the guide for that exact pairing opens with the citation style your department uses already applied. If you are earlier in the process - or shopping for a topic - start from your major's family below and read how its assignment mix works across a whole degree.

• APA-family majors: 16 guides' worth of health, business and social-science formats graded on author-date precision.
• MLA-family majors: humanities formats where evidence is quoted, framed and argued line by line.
• Chicago-family majors: long-form papers with notes-bibliography mechanics and archive-grade sourcing.
• IEEE and mixed-style majors: numbered citations, lab conventions and code appendices.

What is inside every subject x format guide

Each crossover guide follows the same working skeleton so you can move between them without relearning the layout. Every page documents the format's section-by-section structure as your major expects it, the grading weights rubrics actually assign, the length convention for that pairing, and the citation mechanics your field's style guide mandates - including the edge cases, like when a nursing literature review needs an evidence table or a history paper needs primary-source footing on every claim.

The guides also carry the interactive tools matched to that assignment: a deadline planner that back-solves your schedule from the due date, a citation generator pre-set to the department's style, a word counter calibrated to the pairing's length convention, and format-specific builders - a thesis builder for argument papers, a synthesis matrix for literature reviews, a structure checklist for lab reports. Everything runs in the browser with no signup.

Citation style by major: the quick map

Citation style is the fastest thing graders check and the slowest thing students fix, so every guide states its department's default up front. The map below shows where each major lands. Treat it as the field default, not a rule: a syllabus always wins, and a few departments switch styles between intro courses and capstones - the guide for your exact pairing calls out those crossovers where they exist.

One practical note: the style column is what the guide's citation generator opens with, so a psychology student opening any psychology guide gets APA 7 mechanics without configuring anything. Mixed-style majors get both - the biology guides, for instance, flag which courses lean CSE and which lean APA before you commit to a reference format.

Which guide should you open first?

If you have the assignment sheet in hand: open the guide for the exact pairing and read the structure section first - it tells you what each section must accomplish before you write a word, which is the cheapest possible time to fix a wrong plan. Then run the deadline planner with your real due date; it splits the work into drafting, evidence and revision days instead of one fictional writing day before the deadline.

If you are planning a semester rather than a paper: open your major's subject page first to see the full assignment mix across the degree, then dip into the two or three format guides your program assigns most. Students who know the grading weights before week one consistently report less rewriting later - the rubric sections exist precisely so you can write to the criteria instead of discovering them in feedback.