There are several types of academic papers that professors and instructors require their students to submit each semester. A term paper requires a student to produce an original work, which discusses a specific topic in detail. It is called as such since it takes the student the whole semester to finish it. This topic can be assigned by the professor or it can be suggested by the student and is pre-approved by the teacher. It is usually several pages in length and is submitted at the end of the semester. While it is fairly easy to write since the student has a lot of time to finish it, a lot of them take the allotted time for granted and try to finish it at the last minute. There are those who succeed but many of them receive a low grade or even worse, fail to finish it on time because they do not have enough resources or the right knowledge to write the paper.

Students also have to think about the citation style that the professor assigned for the paper. Citation styles vary and include the American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), American Medical Association (AMA), Turabian, and Chicago.