Learn how to use Questia!

April 18, 2001

Learn to use and maximize Questia's research and paper writing tools. Hosts, Mark and Suzan will walk you through Questia's features, including: search, citation, footnotes, highlighting, automatic bibliographies and the encyclopedia.

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Questia: Welcome to Questia 101! This evening you will learn how to maximize Questia's research and writing tools, and it will only take a few minutes! Mark and Suzan will guide you through the Questia service and explain many features, including search, citation, footnotes highlighting, automatic bibliographies and the encyclopedia. Please feel free to ask Mark and Suzan questions at any time! Take it away Mark and Suzan!

Suzan: Hi! This is Suzan! And I work on Service Marketing.

Mark: If you've gotten this far, you probably already know that you can access thousands of books and journal articles and if you happen to get lost in today's chat, you can click on the link to the left of the chat and it will take you to www.questia.com

Suzan: So let's jump in and get started. There are 3 main ways to search the Questia library - Quick search, power search and explore by topic. Quick search is pretty much what it says it is--quick! However, you can limit your search by choosing a specific format, book, journal or encyclopedia or you can broaden your search by using a full text search. If you choose a full text search you are actually searching each and every word in each book and journal in the library. Sometimes that takes a few more seconds. To sum it up, use Quick Search to get an idea of publications available about your topic.

Mark: With that overview of the service, we would be willing to answer any questions.

Lotto: Why do I have to accept this security certificate before I look at a book?

Mark: Because to access the full text of the publications with all of the neat features such as the highlighter, the margin note creator and the citation assistant it is important to accept the certificate for us to be able to interact with your computer.

Tomas: Will Questia add CBE citation style?

Suzan: Actually CBE is a scientific citation style and our collection focuses on the humanities and social sciences, so we will not.

Lori: What is the difference between Turabian reference list & Turabian bibliographic style?

Suzan: The Turabian reference style includes the author and date while the Turabian bibliographic style is a footnotes and endnotes version.

Mark: After you do a search and you hit "enter", you are presented with a number of different search results. If you don't like the search results that you receive you should either try to go to Power Search and do more of a specific search, which will allow you the opportunity to do a full text search where you can really take control of the power of this search engine that Questia has created. The full text search actually searches every word on millions and millions of pages for the phrase that you are looking for. So, full text search is one of the best ways to find publications for your research paper if you didn't find it using Quick Search or Explore by Topic.

Suzan: Let's talk about Explore by Topic. This is how you browse through the virtual stacks of the collection. Say you don't have a specific topic in mind for your research paper. To get paper topic ideas, just click on an academic category and you will see every title that Questia holds in that discipline. If you choose one like Psychology, you get search results for thousands of books on psychology but you also have the option to narrow to topics like Developmental and Educational Psychology where you will find fewer but more specific titles. For those of you following along on the Questia service, try doing a Quick Search or a Power Search and see what you get.

Comic Shop: Can I do business research with Questia?

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