Questia 101

April 26, 2001

Learn How to Use Questia in Just a Few Minutes

Page 1 of 4

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!

Mark: Hi, my name is Mark Walker, and I am one of the members of the Questia Product Development Team!

Suzan: Hi. This is Suzan, and I'm also one of the members of the Questia Product Development Team!

Mark: While we go through our tutorial this evening, you may want to click on the link to the Questia web site in the chat room. This way, you can have Questia and the chat open at the same time. Although it won't be necessary to have Questia open during the chat, you may find it helpful, and you may go to each feature as we explain them. So now, let's begin talking about search.

Suzan: There are three main ways to search the Questia library. The first is Quick Search, which is when you have a specific topic in mind, and are interested to see what is available. The second way is Power Search, and it is when you want to limit your search to more specifics. The third way is Explore By Topic, and that's when you have a general topic that you're trying to refine. Let's talk about Quick Search for a moment. The default settings on Quick Search are the title, subject, and author, and it searches all content in the Questia Library--books, journal articles, and the encyclopedia. When you put in multiple words, it "ands" them together. It also looks for variations on your word, such as plural. If you change the option, and use "Within the Full Text," you go further into the content. It's a good idea to use this when you initially get a limited number of results, or are unsure of the terminology used in the library.

Mark: Now, let's give a brief overview on Power Search. You can find Power Search right after the Quick Search tab once you subscribe into the service, or by selecting "New Search" in the global navigation bar on the top. Power Search was designed to aid users in finding text in an efficient manner. Users can use Boolean terminology in the Power Search fields. We allow the users who do not know Boolean terminology to use the drop-down boxes. In the first drop-down box to assist them in their Boolean search, the user can select either "All the words," "Any of the words," "The exact phrase," or "Words close to each other" as an option. Then, in the next drop-down box that's defaulted to "Full Text," we allow users to search six different fields within our twenty million pages of text within the database!

Suzan: You'll also notice that you can include variations in your search, such as run, ran, or running, or synonyms, such as car, which would equal automobile. If you need more than two boxes to search, you can use the "add a search row" function. That will open another line--instead of boxes--to put in a search term, and narrow (or broaden) your search.

Page 1 of 4