We undertake a spectral study of a sample of bright X-ray sources taken from
six XMM-Newton fields at high galactic latitudes, where AGN are the most
populous class. These six fields were chosen such that the observation had an
exposure time more than 60 ksec, had data from the EPIC-pn detector in the
full-Frame mode and lying at high galactic latitude ∣b∣>25o . The analysis
started by fitting the spectra of all sources with an absorbed power-law model,
and then we fitted all the spectra with an absorbed power-law with a low energy
black-body component model.The sources for which we added a black body gave an
F-test probability of 0.01 or less (i.e. at 99% confidence level), were
recognized as sources that display soft excess. We perform a comparative
analysis of soft excess spectral parameters with respect to the underlying
power-law one for sources that satisfy this criterion. Those sources, that do
not show evidence for a soft excess, based on the F-test probability at a 99%
confidence level, were also fitted with the absorbed power-law with a low
energy black-body component model with the black-body temperature fixed at 0.1
and 0.2 keV. We establish upper limits on the soft excess flux for those
sources at these two temperatures. Finally we have made use of Aladdin
interactive sky atlas and matching with NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED)
to identify the X-ray sources in our sample. For those sources which are
identified in the NED catalogue, we make a comparative study of the soft excess
phenomenon for different types of systems