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.