Amanda Ostaszewski
Academic research website Questia.com helps out students with their research in an easy and efficient manner. Noted for being the largest online collection of its kind, Questia has over 78,000 online books and more than 1 million articles. I discovered Questia during Fall 2013, but I wish that I had known about it long before. Questia.com has become my favorite online resource for research material. Questia saves so much time that it becomes hard to resist all the website has to offer. According to their website, Questia hired a team of experienced librarians and professionals to “hand-select” their extensive collections of books, articles and magazines. This website provides excellent research material for literary and critical essays, but Questia does much more then that.
Here are some reasons to consider using Questia.com
Questia is geared towards the study of the social sciences and the humanities. The topics used by the site include an array of categories such as:
- Corporate Communication
- Web Design
- Literary Periods, Genres, and Forms
- Art and Theater
- Public Health
In addition to featuring these areas of study, one of the best aspects of Questia.com is the ability to organize research material. Students have the advantage of saving an unlimited amount of sources. Students can add notes to sources and pages may be saved for later use. Assistance is available for all different types of bibliographies, including: MLA, APA and Chicago style citations. After getting help if needed, all citations can be downloaded and printed with ease. The website is also quite navigable and user-friendly. In my opinion, with Questia, research becomes a breeze.
Why is Questia.com effective?
- Less time lost when hitting the books
- More free time to spend at home or out on the town, rather then at the library
- Allows you to work on research virtually anywhere
Questia is not just suited for students. Professors may find that incorporating Questia can benefit course material in the classroom. Assignments, tutorial videos and quizzes can be rather effortlessly assembled using the course description tool, which aids in determining what might be useful for that particular class. This feature could also help students who are new to the research process.
Although the site does require a monthly or yearly subscription, the benefits out-weigh the cost, at least in my opinion. One cost efficient way of subscribing to Questia is by only using the website when writing a paper or when doing a project for class. If planned slightly before a research paper is assigned, students may get by on a one-month subscription per semester. From my own experience, I have found that subscribing to Questia is a small price that has paid off over the course of my collegiate career. My subscription to Questia.com has personally allowed me to better keep up with my studies.
For further reviews on Questia, I suggest Top Ten Reviews or East Asia Student, for more information.
