Internal Database Training: JSTOR

Overview

• FHSU has had it for a long time
  • Access to licensed continuing resources
    • arts and sciences 1 collection (183 titles: economics, history, political science, sociology, humanities and social sciences fields)
    • biological sciences collection (226 titles: biology, ecology, zoology, life sciences)
  • owned content
    • purchased arts and sciences 7 collection (253 titles within Alma CKB package, arts humanities, social sciences, business, finance, some health sciences)
• JSTOR is an aggregator, however if they no longer provide access to a journal, they still provide historical access to the journal years they initially provided
  • Largely primary and secondary resource types
• Contains
  • Journals – from volume 1 issue 1 – full runs of journals.
  • Many journals subject to embargos (on a journal page, there’s a box that shows the scope)
    • Browse > Journal> Journal Info > describes the journal, coverage, and embargo/moving wall
    • Navigate to all available years, showing most recent issue first
    • It will give you a preview even if we do not have access
  • Ebooks
  • Primary resources – one of the big pieces they have

Searching JSTOR

• Searching
  • Simple search – straightforward
  • Advanced Search
    • Good 6-7 min video talking about advanced search within JSTOR (LINK IN RESOURCES AREA OF THIS GUIDE PAGE)
    • Add more keyword boxes
    • Apply many results filters ahead of time
    • If you want to change your search, it’s best if you modify your search vs. refining your results (it retains all of your terms)
    • Near/far option (ex. within 5 or 10 terms “Baroque” and “Bach” need to be close together)
    • Narrow it to “reviews” to see scholarly treatments of the resources
    • Most JSTOR content is in English – not an impactful filter
    • Link for the JSTOR libguide page has that video for advanced search
    • Journal Filter (to only see results from journals in a particular field of study or particular journals within that area of study)

Results List

• Images are the first thing that appears – JSTOR/ARTSTOR integration happened this year
  • Images function exactly as it’s found in ARTSTOR platform
  • Same capabilities of ARTSTOR too
• Refining capabilities + search within results
  • When you search within the results it modifies within the persistent search box
• Advanced search gives further ways to refine subjects if relevant
• Refining
  • Type
  • Primary Source Content
  • Date Range
  • Subject
  • Content I can access vs. all content

Lesser Known Features

• Open Research Reports (from homepage > Browse > By Title > select Research Reports format tab
  • 34,000 analysis of hotly debated issues. Open access and free.
  • Way for students to get an overview of an issue, what is currently happening or has happened (replacement for what we see in Access World News or Credo…more subject specific)
• OA and free
  • They have a good amount of open and free content – it’s peppered within search results
    • Growing collection of early journal content (no longer in copyright)
    • You can register to read (get content pushed at you) to get free accessed
  • Independent voices is one of their titles (on our A-Z List)
  • Resources for librarians of open access content in JSTOR
• Text Analyzer Tool
  • Beta tool that they have (from homepage menu > Tools > Text Analyzer
  • Upload a document (your paper or an article you’ve found). JSTOR analyzes it an prioritizes a scale of key terms that you can modify and emphasize.
  • It’s supposed to get more specific/related resources if you have one good article, take this in and look for more.
  • Advanced type of tool for people to use, if they are doing a deep dive.
  • Can be any document, not just from JSTOR
• The Understanding Series
  • Connecting primary text with journal articles and chapters within JSTOR that cite the text
  • You pick a work by browsing to it or searching for it by title, read the work, click on any passage you want to study.
  • It’s limited the to items they’ve placed in this series.
  • Ex: I have a dream speech has links to works who have cited/analyzed portions of that speech
    • Provides you with results who have cited that portion of the speech and allows you to filter that content by type/year/access level
• Data for Research
  • Text mining support
  • Create datasets within JSTOR goes out to Constellate (Beta) to build a dataset
  • Allows you to analyze and visualize the articles within that dataset
  • Pulls out key phrase, term frequency, categories, publication dates

Benefits of Creating an Account

• Account features are like many other platforms
• Credentials for logging in are the same for ARTSTOR and JSTOR
  • When you login you have your profile, workspace, free article views, JPASS downloads, Purchase History
  • Workspace – where you save searches and articles
    • Create folder and subfolders to save related searches/items together
    • Add notes for the items
    • When you go to the citation tool it gives MLA, Chicago, APA options and some exporting to NoodleTools, RefWorks, EasyBib, RIS file, Text File
    • I had to copy/paste it into my note

Support

• They have several research guides available (some for librarians, some for users)
• Specific on topics and types of resources on JSTOR
• ITHAKA over the last few years – smaller outfit. More research intensive. They gather a lot of data to inform their delivery.

As of 11/17/21, JSTOR was mapped to 23 guides (19 unpublished or private) including several in Art, English, IDS, Music, Political Science, and History.