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.

Questia research tutorials

The fall semester has barely begun and already you’re feeling the stress of research paper writing and completing homework assignments. How are you going to fit everything into your already jam-packed schedule? Lucky for you, now you can have access to a secret weapon for students. It’s called Questia, the premier online research and paper-writing tool for students. We’ve put together a full arsenal of tools, tips and videos in our Research tutorials section to help you tackle the toughest research assignment while keeping your cool.

Check out Questia

At Questia you’ll have access to over 6 million full-text books and articles. But all those juicy resources won’t do you any good if you can’t find them and use them for creating those “A” research papers. Questia also sports timesaving research tools such as highlights, notes and bookmarks. With these tools, you can return to Questia time after time and pick up right where you left off in gathering and organizing your materials. And the best part is that Questia includes a tool to help you create professor-approved citations and bibliographies (or works cited) for your papers.

Here’s the deal

If you’re not already a member of Questia, you can still test out some of the organizational tools like highlighting in multiple colors for your notes, however, research tutorials are an extra special treat only available to those with a Questia membership. Now, here’s the deal. If you’re not already convinced of the value of Questia, go to the site and sign up for the free Questia trial to test it out for yourself. When you’re all signed up for your free trial, you’ll be able to test out our research tutorial on evaluating sources to see for yourself!

Research tools

Once you’re logged in at the Questia site, be sure to click on the link for Research tutorials at the top of the home page. This link takes you to a growing collection of interactive tutorials that you can view, start and resume at any time. Coming this fall in time for mid-end of semester research papers will be a total of 10 Research tutorials including:

• Planning a paper
• Conducting research
• Using the library
• Evaluating resources
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Integrating sources
• Paraphrasing sources
• Summarizing sources
• Quoting sources
• Working with documentation styles

Let’s take “Evaluating resources,” for example. Have you ever had grief from an instructor because you didn’t find high quality resources for your research project or term paper? Well, suffer no more. After you look through this set of videos, examples and quizzes, you’ll be an expert on finding reliable sources.

And that’s just one of the research tutorials that awaits you at Questia. There’s so much more! Think of all the time and aggravation you can save this semester just by making Questia your resource for all things research. With Questia, you can kiss aimless Internet searching goodbye and say hello to higher grades and instructor praise. The sooner you sign up, the sooner you can take advantage of the many benefits and start earning those higher grades.

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!

Librarian selected, professor approved

What makes Questia so great for students? First of all, the sources have all been approved by librarians and professors. No more worrying about having your sources questioned. Plus, thousands of the available books have been written by professors so you know that their content is based on years of experience and research — just the kind of sources that your instructors love to see on a term paper.

As for subjects, check out our research topics page to find books and articles on all kinds of topics including:

• History
• Economics
• Psychology
• Political science
• Anthropology
• English and literature

Need research tools? No problem. Questia tools help you to streamline your research process with tools such as:

• Highlights: use different colors to select and save text of interest.
• Notes: write notes to yourself directly to book pages or articles.
• Bookmarks: want to go back for that great quote? Find it fast with a bookmark.
• Bibliographies: no more sweating over proper format. Questia will automatically generate your bibliography in MLA, APA or Chicago format.
• Citations: you’ll be able to cite passages, pages or entire articles instantly.
• Project folders: if you’re working on several projects at once, you’ll love the ability to organize your notes, highlights, bookmarks, and reference information into custom project folders.

Become a research superstar

Many students find the research process to be tedious and time consuming. In other words — boring. It doesn’t have to be that way. Questia’s research tools will help you do accomplish more and enjoy the process, too.

When it comes to research, you need to have a plan. You’ll begin by finding your focus. What are you going to research and write about? Finding your research topic is a breeze with Questia because its library of topics will help you to flow from general subjects to specific topics. Then, all you have to do is to follow the many resource links to zero in on the exact books and articles that you’ll use for your project.

Help when using other sources

Even if you decide to use sources outside of Questia’s vast library, you’ll still benefit because Questia’s research tutorials teach you how to evaluate sources to make sure that they are the kind of credible sources that your instructor will accept. Not only does Questia help you to find and evaluate credible sources, it also gives you examples of how to distinguish between those sources that are popular and those that are scholarly (based on research). It also teaches you to identify when an author’s approach is opinion and whether it is too biased to be of use to you.

Do you like to use Wikipedia despite the fact that the very thought makes your instructors cringe? No problem. Questia will show you how and when to use Wikipedia and other encyclopedias in your research process.

Your secret weapon

The new Questia will quickly become your best friend, a valued tool and secret weapon in achieving your academic goals. You’ll amaze your instructors and yourself at the quality of your research projects and the ease with which you completed them. Get a head start on success and go check out Questia now!