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Collections Frequently Asked Questions

The Questia Collection
What criteria are used to develop the collection?
What kinds of publications are on the service?
What is the age of the collection?
Does Questia feel that any books are inappropriate for your collection?
How can I submit recommendations for titles you should include in your collection?
What is the level of quality/accuracy in the digitization of titles?
Are there pictures in the books? What about maps, charts, and tables?
Does the collection contain the "state selected library lists" for each state?
Are historical collections, materials, or manuscripts available? Works of art?
Why are you only focusing on liberal arts titles? When will you also have business and science content?
Do you have both fiction and non-fiction titles? What about novels?
Literature Reviews vs. Research articles - How to tell the difference
Why Don't Some Articles Have Page Numbers?

What criteria are used to develop the collection?
Collection development is handled by experienced professional librarians who have years of experience in building academic collections. The collection has been developed using a mixture of traditional and innovative methods. These methods are based on sound collection practices which focus on the quality and value of the individual titles to undergraduate students in the liberal arts.
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What kinds of publications are on the service?
The Questia service includes scholarly books and journal articles written in the English language to support an undergraduate curriculum in the liberal arts (subjects such as history, philosophy, economics, political science, English and literature, anthropology, psychology, and sociology). It also includes magazine and newspaper articles. The collection excludes textbooks and titles in business and the hard sciences.
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What is the age of the collection?
Our goal is to develop a collection that provides substantial coverage of high quality information for most post-secondary core curriculum course assignments. A well-balanced collection has strong retrospective content, evidenced especially through citation links, as well as new titles. As works are constantly being added to the service, an exact figure is not available.
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Does Questia feel that any books are inappropriate for your collection?
Questia promotes the principles of intellectual freedom by providing publications that represent diverse viewpoints. Questia does not exclude materials based on the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.
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How can I submit recommendations for titles you should include in your collection?
If you would like to make specific recommendations for books we should include, please email us at collection_development@questia.com.
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What is the level of quality/accuracy in the digitization of titles?
Questia is committed to ensuring that its electronic versions mirror the original print versions to the fullest extent possible. Specifically, all electronic texts in the Questia service replicate original pagination and line breaks. In addition, Questia is vigilant about ensuring the highest level of accuracy and integrity of the scanned titles.
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Are there pictures in the books? What about maps, charts, and tables?
All original illustrations, graphs, and tables are included on the service if we have been able to acquire appropriate licensing rights.
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Does the collection contain the "state selected library lists" for each state?
Collection decisions are based on a number of factors, including recommended reading lists. But individual titles are selected on the basis of what they add to the overall collection rather than because they appear on a state list.
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Are historical collections, materials, or manuscripts available? Works of art?
We have no plans at this time to include rare or special collections material or manuscripts. Works of art are included if they are part of a text, but not as individual items.
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Why are you only focusing on liberal arts titles? When will you also have business and science content?
The Questia collection is focusing on liberal arts titles as they have a long period of sustained intellectual value. In the sciences and business, new information is constantly replacing old. We will evaluate opportunities to provide access to other disciplines in the future.
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Do you have both fiction and non-fiction titles? What about novels?
Yes, Questia carries both fiction and non-fiction titles. Titles are chosen to support undergraduate coursework in the liberal arts. If you are interested in a specific title, searching the Questia collection does not require a subscription, and you can quickly see if we have the publication you are looking for.
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Literature Reviews vs. Research Articles - How to tell the difference

An article that is a "literature review" or a "review of the literature" summarizes the state of research in a specific field. The article will list important articles and/or books in the subject, summarize them, and indicate why they are especially noteworthy. A literature review is different from an article that is an original research study because the literature review does not contain any original research -- it identifies and describes others' original research. In an article that is an original research study, the researcher designs a study to explore a hypothesis or answer a question, conducts the research, and draws conclusions based on his or her original research.

Many (but not all) literature reviews include phrases such as the following in their titles: "literature review," "review of the literature," and "review of literature." To locate literature reviews, you can use the Advanced Search option and put one of these phrases on the Title line and your subject on the Keyword(s) line.

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Why Don't Some Articles Have Page Numbers?

For some of the articles on Questia, we receive them as text files without page breaks. Therefore, we do not know the pagination of the printed version of the article. For these articles, in the bibliographic information at the bottom of the article and in the citation and bibliography entry for that article we display the first page of the article. If the article was only one page, we display just the one page number. If the article was more than one page, we display the page number of the first page of the article followed by the plus sign. Modern citation styles take into account that this type of article presentation is increasingly common, and it is legitimate to cite using this information as long as you follow the rules that apply to such articles. Questia's bibliography and citation tools will do this for you automatically, using the appropriate page number format.

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