Questia Review — Comparison (2012)

Questia, the Online Library is an online library offering mostly subscription based E-books and E-articles for academic study. In addition, Questia offers a limited number of free articles available for public access, as well as, the first page of featured books for free, and a table of contents available for each book available. This online library can be accessed online at questia.com.

I personally have past experience with using Questia, a few years ago, and I can tell you that it was a valuable tool for me as a psychology major, as Questia offers the most complete index of social science based texts online.  Questia boasts the largest available online library relating to the social sciences, which works out great for me. There are also over 4 million articles and 77,000 books in total offered at the site.  In addition Questia offers a fully functional and detailed free encyclopedia that offers far more accurate information than open access encyclopedias or many, free trial, online encyclopedias, as well.

As one example I looked into “Diplomatic Relations Between, the United States and Brazil" within the free encyclopedia at Questia. The search result revealed a book reading, with 328 pages. Other entries were also available. Now, you cannot view all 328 pages without signing up for a free trial, however, I was able to view the first 8 pages exactly, which gave me a wealth of information with many words per page, of about 295 or so words, on pages 3-8. With 6 pages that amounts to 1,770 words.

Many free excerpts include far more words than aforementioned, like 2,000-2800, or so. What is really useful is the for each subject heading there are multiple entries with different information to read as part of the free preview prior to committing to free trial, for full access. Also for each subject there is overview with fundamental information split up into subheadings, on top of the page that one can read prior to reading the free excerpt pages.

In addition there are around 5,000 books offered in full text for free, like classics by: Sigmund Freud, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name a few. There are also 15 books offered on social communication that helped my wife with her communications classes and my social psychology courses as well. These books were also 100% full text and some of the titles include: The Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace, Sects, Cults, and Spiritual Communities: A Sociological Analysis and, Computers, Phones, and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology.

The encyclopedia selections are further sub-divided into book entries and journal entries at the bottom of the page. I was a little bit surprised that I could not access the articles without activating a free trial, (I had a free trial some time ago, which I based past papers on) but I did go ahead and activate a free trial to recall and update myself on, what Questia has to offer. The detailed information, I was able to access literally floored me. I was able to get much needed data, statistics and philosophical arguments regarding psychology and sociology, as well as, the logic within the social sciences, in general.

Questia has some redundant search information provided by University libraries, and many articles can be found via Google Scholar. However, Questia does offer many full text articles affordably included in the price, that Google Scholar does not. Questia also offers books and articles researchers need that Google's Scholar and Books does not, as well as, those that Universities do not. Questia is more convenient than going to a brick and mortar library. Questia is cheaper than purchasing seperate digital or hard copy books, even from used book stores, on average over a 3-12 month period. Questia is a solid source for engineering and physics research and it does offer ample articles on: architecture and science history. It is a little difficult to navigate the Questia site without a visible A-Z index of journal titles. However, the research topic guide and the research subject catergories are very useful. Overall customers and other reviewers felt Questia was worth checking out and signing up, at least for the trial. Questia is described as being a good value for the subscription rate.

Questia provides a more comprehensive and cost effective service than either Google Books and more exclusive content than Internet Archive.Internet archive is a non-profit service that scans in around 1,000 public domain assessed books a day.  As aforementioned, Questia also offers additional materials not widely found at many public libraries or University libraries, whether online or located in a building. Furthermore, although Google Books offers over a million public domain books to read, other sites like  Many book offered in Google Books are only available for limited preview, or only offer the title, catalogue number and a brief review. Purchasing full access to separate books on Google Books could become expensive for a serious student, or researcher. For a graduate student this could conceivably be $50-$100 a month to gain full text access to books offered by Google.

Internet archive, though a useful service does not provide more premium content that requires a free be attached for their viewing. Thus the for profit model of Questia, is a superior one for a student researcher to gain access to a myriad of content at an affordable price. In addition the list of free content continues to grow at Questia.

Internet Archive is a free service, as is the preview service of Google books. Google Scholar offers many previews and some full text for free to the casual user and more full text for free to those with University library access. However, many articles may need to be purchased separately where Universities do not have full subscription access due to the high cost of a full subscription. In this case a single journal PDF can cost on average, $15.00-$45.00 and in some cases much more. For example many Science Direct and the journal Nature will not provide full access to newer or more highly esteemed articles on Google Scholar. Google Books can charge between $5.00 and $50.00 per full access to a textbook which can amount to several hundred dollars a year spent. Questia costs $20.00 a month for monthly subscriptions, $45.00 for 3 month subscriptions and around $100.00 for a yearly subscription. $20.00 times 12 gives $240.00 which might be a bit high for many to spend, but the monthly customer usually does not need the service year round. $45.00 times 4 gives $180.00 for the year, so the best value is just paying the $100.00 for the year if you need the service fairly regularly.

In general customer reviews are very favorable of Questia, with the low cost of access to the depth and breadth of information being a common theme across customer reviews.Some customer blogs  I read, complained of article redundancy between Questia and their University library, while others stated they just used Google books or  scholar. Even these reviewers admitted Questia maybe useful, however. Customers commented on the pricing packages as reasons to sign up: for the occasional user, in need of quick references one might choose the $45.00 for 3 months to save a few bucks over the $20.00 a month charge unless they only need the service for one month. For the regular user it is more efficient and cost effective to sign for a full year of service for just under $100.00. I find the information a great supplement to my online library and the local library. I find that there are more esoteric and classical works which I find more difficult, or nearly impossible to find, elsewhere that Questia does offer, like for example as compared to a Google scholar search. Even with a University subscription, and looking through some of the same journals both Questia and my University offer, I still find articles on stress and hormone response via Questia that I cannot find in the former sources. Thus in addition to acting as a sort of supplement for my research, Questia also acts as a resource of knowledge and data that I cannot find elsewhere.

Caveats and Final Words

If you have a good University and/or public library nearby, you can do very well with those resources. Questia is a great resource for very, detail oriented/serious high school, undergraduate students and most graduate students as well. Questia does offer some of the same services that libraries do, and it is a little cumbersome of an interface to find specific journal titles. Questia is more designed to give article titles based upon topic or subject matter than journal name. I am very accustomed to seeing an A-Z index of the journals my University offers.  However, Questia will pull up articles not found in most University data bases. I have experience with looking through journals of: Nassau, Community College, Walden University and Oklahoma State University, and all are of high caliber, but Questia fills in many research review gaps for me. My areas of study also include: technology and human interface and online education research, which Questia does offer ample entries on.  Another cool feature of Questia is you can create your own bibliography and save this information to be cited in a given paper.
On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is a perfect score, an A, and 1 is poor, an F, I give Questia an overall rating of 8.6. This 8.6 translates into a B+ and is a very high score based upon my experiences with Questia, customer reviews I read, and comparing the service to several University Libraries as well. Two areas of improvement would be to adopt a University format with ease of finding specific journal titles, and to improve the page turning function on the ebooks.