That’s right! We’ll trade our research for yours

Entering the drawing is quick and easy:

1. Download our new Questia iOS app here - Questia – College Research Library for Writing Essays and Homework
2. Put the Questia iOS app through it’s paces while enjoying some of these features:
   • Quickly find credible books, scholarly articles and topics for your research papers
   • Read full-text books and articles in the app
   • Ability to save what you are reading for future access in a project folder
   • Easy to use display makes searching and reading a fluid, seamless experience
3.  Come back here before April 15, 2013 and let us know what you think by filling out the form on our Facebook page
4. Finally, check your email or our Facebook page on April 16, 2013 to see if you are one of the ten lucky winners

So what are you waiting for? Download the Questia app now and tell us what you think. Your opinion could be worth a free month of Questia!

You’re on your way to being entered to win one month of FREE Questia access!

But why wait until April 16th to enjoy the benefits of a Questia subscription? Your research paper is due TOMORROW! Click the button below for a free 1 day preview and start writing better papers faster TODAY!

Instructors suggest 10 hours or more to complete the final paper, recognizing the many steps involved to craft an effective research paper. For their part students know that writing a research paper can be overwhelming, taking entire days, weeks or months to complete. Yet while over 52% of college instructors recommend starting a research paper the day it is assigned, only 17% of students report doing so.

The reasons for this disconnect vary. Many of the skills required to write an effective research paper are new to students, who often enter college level courses ill-prepared to take on an extended research assignment.   Sound academic writing requires that students understand how to avoid plagiarism, how to integrate sources seamlessly, and how to correctly cite sources, yet teaching the fundamentals of the research process takes focus away from the main course objectives in most courses.  Students face a process that can be unfamiliar or daunting, and do not plan accordingly.

Questia‘s brand new tutorials teach the research process in a completely digital, multi-modal format including 50 videos, 50 learning activities, and 500 quiz questions.   When students dive into Questia’s wide range of research tutorials, they’ll find complete sets of faculty-developed instructional videos, example lessons and quizzes to master every step of the paper-writing process.  Combined with an online library of more than 75,000 books, 9 million articles and an unmatched set of research tools, Questia now presents a unique and powerful set of solutions to the problems students and instructors face when working on a research project.

A sampling of Questia’s comprehensive research tutorials include:

• Planning a Paper: Finding the right topic, developing a point of view, and organizing thoughts and sources in a coherent way is crucial. This tutorial helps students start off on the right foot.
• Evaluating Sources: This tutorial helps students learn to evaluate print and Web sources by deciding whether a source is credible, safe to use and highly relevant to their research topic.
• Avoiding Plagiarism: The difference between paraphrasing and plagiarizing is often misunderstood. This tutorial teaches students when and how to quote directly, paraphrase passages or, simply summarize the main points.
• Quoting Sources: Quality research assignments include citing an array of quality sources. Students can learn how to effectively quote sources and follow the correct in-text citation.
• Working with Documentation Styles: With differences between in-text citations, bibliographies and quotation styles, it’s no easy feat to master all writing style guidelines. This tutorial introduces students to MLA, APA, and Chicago documentation styles, as well as the features that all citation styles have in common.

Questia has always saved students valuable time on research papers and projects, and now its research tutorials can serve as students’ own private tutor, helping them strengthen their grasp of research and writing. If not already a member, students may sign up for a free one-day trial at Questia.com and start writing better research papers faster. Instructors may receive more information and a demonstration from their Cengage Learning representative.

Background

We know that researching on your mobile device is an experience unique from that of researching on your laptop of desktop. With that in mind, we thought long and hard on what it means to perform research while on a phone or tablet and, more importantly, what set of features make for a compelling mobile research experience.

Scholars on the go hold a preference for researching in smaller increments and aren’t necessarily hunkered down to do a large portion of work all at once. So we built around a set of features that give you quick access to highly relevant content, research tools to evaluate that material quickly and a convenient workspace to organize it all for further exploration once back in front of a desktop or laptop.

App overview

The Questia iOS app encompasses three key features for users that help enhance the research experience.

• Search & Discovery: Questia’s online collection contains over 70,000 books and 6 million articles. The new app simplifies the search interface to make it easy for users to quickly find and evaluate content. With the search feature, users have instant access to high-quality content hand-selected by librarians.
• Smooth Reading: Reading on a mobile device’s small screen used to get frustrating fast. The new app features a fluid reading style with easy-turn pages on par with the popular tablet reading styles.
• Saved Projects: Few people use mobile phones as their primary tool for research, but having it as a handy side-kick for researching on the go makes for limitless possibilities. The Questia iOS app simplifies projects, making it easy for users to save and later access research both on their mobile and on their computer.

With the user friendly interface, you can easily navigate between mobile and desktop platforms to search, read and organize your work. We also provide utility to users who aren’t currently Questia subscribers by offering a free version of the app. In this version, some aspects can be used for free, but other premium features are special benefits for our Questia members, who can access 100% of the Questia library, its research tools and cloud-synched project folders.

Free vs. Premium

The new Questia iOS app helps students access information on the go and write better research papers faster. The free app will be available for download in the iTunes store January 14^th, 2013.  For those interested in gaining access to the full Questia library and arsenal of research tools, yearly subscriptions are $99.99, semester subscriptions are $49.99 and monthly subscriptions are available for just $19.99. Begin researching better and faster today!

Questia has helped students find and cite high-quality, scholarly research since its founding in 1998. Combining a deep library of online books and articles, easy-to-use search engine and time-saving tools, Questia will help you research smarter, faster.

Questia has always offered high quality sources selected by librarians and approved by professors, many of them peer-reviewed! Our library contains high-quality scholarly books, journal articles, and magazine and newspaper articles. With more than 75,000 academic books and more than 9 million articles from hundreds of the world’s leading publishers, Questia is your single destination for academic and professional research – and nothing is ever checked out!

The Questia library contains books and journal articles on subjects such as history, philosophy, economics, political science, English and literature, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. It also includes magazine and newspaper articles.

Questia Librarian Nancy Buchanan reveals more of the biggest updates and features you’ll want to know about to get the most out of your research.

As students around the world prepare themselves for the final term papers of the semester, many find themselves at quite a loss on where to begin. Buchanan recommends heading to Questia’s collection of in-depth research topic pages for help in selecting your topic and sources. “Our topic pages provide students and researchers alike with great resources categorized by subject. These topics link users directly to high-quality sources that were all hand-selected by librarians,” said Nancy. This means you can be sure that everything you’re linked to is relevant to your assignment topic!

With all the exciting changes and additions, Buchanan would like to remind students that Questia has thousands of in-depth research topic pages, with each of those topics containing links to librarian-selected books and articles about the topic. “It’s a great starting point for students to brainstorm ideas for their research papers. We have a vast array of topics for a wide range of subjects — everything from art and history to science and sociology topics.”

With the relaunch of Questia came thousands of new scholarly books as well as academic journals and magazines. The Science Teacher, The Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek are just a few new publications you’ll find on Questia. And that’s not all. “We’re always continuing to add books and periodicals to Questia. We’ll also be adding new books from a wide range of our existing, highly respected academic publishers.” In addition to that, she reveals that Questia will also be striving to increase the currency of the collection with newer titles.

With all the additions, it’s a wonder how Questia goes about selecting all this hand-picked, librarian-approved content. Nancy Buchanan explains the criteria that go into choosing new content:

1. Subject: Will our users find it valuable?
2. Treatment of subject: Is the theme treated appropriately for our users? Is it education-based, rather than a “how-to” or overly general?
3. Credibility: Are the authors, publishers and contributors all good for student research?
4. Timeliness: Is the content as up-to-date and relevant as it ought to be?
5. Lasting value: Is this content going to be something readers will want to reference for years to come?

As students dive into this wealth of quality information, Buchanan still reminds that it is essential to further evaluate the research for their own purposes. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Given my topic, is this book addressing my topic?
2. Does it add value and importance?
3. Is it timeliness enough for my paper? Should not just mention or brush the top level of the topic.
4. If you’re searching outside of Questia, is it credible? If you can’t find info on the author and you can’t find it in the book, you can often find it online. If it’s a scholarly source, try to find out where does this person teach, what else have they written in the past, what are their credentials?

With all the exciting changes and additions to Questia, it’s important not to forget the innovative tools that users have come to know and love, such as the highlighting and note-taking tools, citation tools and the ever-popular bibliography tool. “We support MLA, APA and Chicago Notes Bibliography. Style requirements change nearly every year and it is important for students to stay up to date. Questia formats your bibliography correctly with the most up-to-date style manuals,” Buchanan notes.

With the new and improved Questia, students can be sure they’re getting high-quality sources and using the best research and paper-writing tools available. Questia helps students to write better papers faster.

Questia has continually adapted to customer needs and behaviors throughout the years, but no other Questia site redesign has been as significant as this one. “The Internet has made huge leaps in recent years in terms of innovation and user experience; and with new technologies, people have found new ways to be more efficient,” said Jeppsen. “We’re introducing a brand new Questia that follows design and use patterns people are familiar with.

Questia’s evolution consists of many changes that you many not individually notice, but together makes a vast difference in the way you’ll better be able to conduct research and write papers. For example, Greg Hubbard highlights Questia’s enhancements and capabilities that will save you time the next time you have a paper due:

• Site-wide (or global) search from anywhere on the site
• Search filters with innovative search options to refine your keywords and narrow down your search within specific publications and publish dates
• Search results are returned in order of relevancy, separated by different tabs depending on media type like books, academic journals, magazine articles, etc.
• Profile pages with publication details, a synopsis, table of contents and related research have been added to all books and articles
• Searching within a book or article includes results the sentence the keyword was found in for you to determine the context and whether going to that page is what you need
• Creating citations and bibliographies require less clicks to generate, making them faster and easier to crank out
• You can view all your saved work in a panel to the right without leaving the page you’re reading and save it all for future access
• Look up words from within a book or article with new dictionary and thesaurus tools

With the redesign, Questia also expanded its library to add over 3,000 more books! Hubbard explains, “thousands more will be added throughout this upcoming year because the website’s updated format allows for more content to be added more frequently. We’re also focusing on making more recent content available to users.” Questia currently has over 70 thousand books and 6 million articles, but Jeppsen emphasizes Questia’s accessibility so customers can use it wherever and whenever. “We’re getting in front of students and faculty where they need us, and that means not just the Web, but on mobile devices.” Download the Questia Library app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch for free.

The redesign doesn’t end there; it’s just the beginning of a new phase of evolution for Questia. “Students and faculty also have a complete set of original resources and video tutorials to look forward to. These tutorials offer tips and guides for writing a research paper – from how to generate ideas for a paper to finding credible sources to proper citations.” says Jeppsen. “Questia is a full service resource center, providing a deep library of educational materials with the tools and resources to cite sources properly.” Members can take a look at the four research tutorials that are live on the site now, with more to come in the near future!

Hubbard believes that education and research are constantly adapting to the way that individuals learn. “Evolving technology like Questia’s content, tutorials and tools allows learning to be more dynamic and widely distributed. It brings knowledge straight to you, allowing research and learning to be less linear and more customizable.” For example, Hubbard mentions that Questia has grown to be an asset to users outside the U.S. because Questia brings quality content and paper-writing resources to English-speaking readers around the world that may not have easy access to English-speaking libraries.

Questia provides tools to make study life more efficient, reducing the time consuming or even tedious tasks of researching. “We’ve created tools for making the research process more efficient so students can spend their time digesting the research and thinking; analyzing and interpreting information—maximize their time spent learning.”

For complete details and video demos on the new Questia, go to the Questia relaunch page.

Questia offers students and academics access to the world’s largest online library with entries for 44 million journals, magazine articles and newspaper stories, and 77,000 books. Even 5,000 rare and classic books are available for free to everyone online. Questia’s topic pages offer many academic subjects from which to research, while blog entries offer advice, tips, and how-to articles about selecting topics and writing research papers that get noticed by professors.

Finding a topic

Finding a topic on Questia in your academic field is so easy. On Questia.com, select “Browse Our Library” to reveal a list of topics that encompass a variety of subjects — Architecture, the Arts, Business, Communications, Education, Government, History, Law, Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Science, and Sociology.

Each topic category subdivides into even more suggestions to choose from. For example, the psychology topic breaks down into specific areas of study, such as abnormal psychology, cognitive psychology, child psychology, mental health, and counseling and therapy. There is also general information about the subject, such as this history of psychology and the ethics of psychology.

Questia Q&A blog

A great place to visit when deciding on a research topic is right here at the Questia Q&A blog page, which, in case you weren’t aware, offers a vast array of topics and resources for you to browse:

• The “Education News” section offers articles on universities and colleges, professors and teachers, academic policies, tuition and ethics in the classroom.
• The “Research Paper Help” section gives advice on selecting topics and writing term papers. “Learn from good examples of research papers,” a December 6, 2011 post by Claire Moore, helps students think of topics, research a topic, follow through with a clear goal, develop a writing process, create an outline and then write a final draft.
• “Study Tips” talks about staying organized and focused on your task, strategies for studying and writing, making your environment conducive to learning and creativity, and keeping your mind open to learning.

Clear your brain, take a walk

“‘My mind beats on, my mind beats on, and no words come.’ Strolling through a garden in his home town of Munich in an attempt to clear his head, [Gustav von] Aschenbach sings these words as he grapples with his lost sense of identity; writing is fundamental to his sense of self, but his usual tightly controlled writing rituals are not having their desired effect,” wrote Shersten Johnson in his article “At a Loss for Words: Writer’s Block in Britten’s Death in Venice,” in the January 1, 2008 issue of PSYART.

When your writing rituals fail you, why not take a break? A walk in a natural setting may not give you a topic for your politics and government paper, but it will give you a variety of sights and sounds and will stimulate your brain. Then, when you get back to your keyboard, you can focus more efficiently on your research paper.

Here are some activities to inspire you:

• Take a walk in the woods, on the beach, in a park, down a city street and observe, listen and smell what’s around you.
• Visit a museum, look at paintings and sculpture to get ideas.
• Go to a library, open random books and read a page or two.
• Exercise to get the blood flowing in your body and brain.

With the new and improved Questia.com on your side, writer’s block will soon become a thing of the past. Curious? Take a tour of Questia!

What makes Questia so special?

Questia is a fully stocked online library with more than 70,000 online books from a variety of reputable commercial and academic presses. Want more? Questia also gives you access to more than 6 million high-quality, citable journal, newspaper and magazine articles. Last, but certainly not least, Questia’s content is all hand-selected by experienced librarians that know just what you need to write a great research paper! Can your college library offer all that without you having to leave the comforts of your dorm room?

Searches on Questia are a breeze. Start with a broad term and use filters to narrow your efforts. You have the option to look for your topic by keyword, publication title, author and more. Your results are divided into categories — books, academic journals, magazine articles, newspaper articles and encyclopedia articles. Find a result that seems like “the one?” Simply click on the read now button to have access to the entire article or book. The joys of technology!

Organizational powerhouse

But Questia isn’t just about finding research. The search engine is also a great organizational tool that can help you manage your research and make your next paper even better. Any notes or citations you create are automatically saved in your most recent active project. Books you save for quick reference can also be incorporated into your “works cited” list later. Select a particular bit of text and a drop down menu immediately pops up that allows you to highlight the text or cite the passage in your paper using either MLA, APA or Chicago styles. How easy was that?

Bookmarks and notes are additional features that help keep you focused and organized. Best of all, you have the option to view all of your highlighted text, citations, notes and bookmarks to the side without having to leave your book’s current page. Click on one of the items and immediately jump to that page. With all this help, paper writing is no longer going to feel like a chore that you put off until the last minute.

Bringing it all together

Now the bad news, you will probably end up writing more than one paper or working on more than one project during your time in college. But, Questia has your back. Your project page lists all the information you have saved within each project. And you can have as many projects as your little heart desires (or your professors demand!). Questia allows you to search within each project to find a specific item or manage your sources and create an instant bibliography, in whatever style you choose, and then print it as a Microsoft Word document. (Feel free to laugh when your parents talk about formatting their bibliographies on their typewriters back in the day! Can you imagine?)

No other site makes finding research as easy as Questia does. Need a little more convincing? How about the more than 500,000 students who have used Questia since it launched? Take a tour and see for yourself all that Questia has to offer, including a range of demos on “Searching Our Library,” “Using Our Research Tools” and “Managing Your Projects”. Those pesky research papers are well on their way to seeming not-so-scary anymore.

Free Questia Library iPad app

Thousands of downloads and positive reviews don’t lie. You’ve told us how much you like the Questia Library app for the iPhone and iPod touch, and you’ve been urging us to make it available on the iPad to make for even easier reading and accessibility of Questia’s online library. Well, good news has arrived for Apple users. By popular demand, the same Questia Library app you know and love on the iPhone is now available on the iPad and can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store!

Anyone can download our app for free, which is now compatible with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch after having released the universal version of the app, and read our collection of more than 5,000 free books. You’ll find many classics such as “Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” by Charles Darwin and “Up from Slavery” by Booker T. Washington as well as history books like “A Handbook of Greek Constitutional History” by A.H.J. Greenidge and “A History of Modern England” by Herbert Paul among thousands of quality books.

Questia is the premier online research tool for college students, saving them valuable time on research papers and projects. With Questia, students can accurately cite sources, format papers in seven different styles, and organize their notes, research and sources all in one place. Librarians have specially selected Questia’s 77,000 academic books and 4 million journal articles—many of which are peer-reviewed. Since Questia is accessible 24/7, students can research any time of day from anywhere, with the confidence that they’re using credible content from trustworthy sources.

When Questia members download the Questia Library app, they gain full mobile access to Questia for as long as their accounts remain active, at no additional cost. Members can now get the complete Questia experience from the convenience of their iPads. They can search and read from Questia’s entire collection, organize research, manage saved projects, and access Questia’s powerful tools for automatically creating citations, footnotes, and bibliographies.

“Users of our iPhone and iPod touch Questia Library apps have been encouraging us to put the app onto the iPad so they can enjoy a better reading experience with the larger screen,” said Questia’s Marketing Director, Matt McCloskey. “One of the great things about Questia is that it allows you to save your research as you go and take notes that you may want to have handy for when you begin writing. With the iPad app, you have all that information at your fingertips no matter where you are.”

Visit the iTunes store to download the free iPad app and start writing better research papers faster!