Robbins Library Notes

As promised, I am writing my first weekly post that gives an overview of a database. The subject of this post will be JSTOR, as it is a popular database among faculty and students.

• What it is: “JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The journals archived in JSTOR span many disciplines….” (From the JSTOR site)

• Strengths:

• Historical Coverage – JSTOR is a valuable resource, offering the user the ability to search back issues of journals in 47 disciplines, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, though there are collections in the empirical sciences as well. JSTOR offers high-quality PDF versions of articles from these journals, some of which go back to the mid-nineteenth century.

• Cross-disciplinary searching — JSTOR allows the user to search across several or all of its disciplines at once. This may be especially useful, for example, for those researching topics in philosophy and law.

• Weaknesses:

• Lack of currency — JSTOR is not a current issue database, as noted in its description: “Because of JSTOR’s archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the back issues available in JSTOR.” Users looking for current issues of journals should not, therefore, use JSTOR to see if these are available. It sounds obvious, but I get a number of requests for assistance in locating current issues and articles because patrons “couldn’t find it in JSTOR and wanted to know why.”

• Limited scope — The philosophy collection only contains 26 journals at present. While there are some big-name journals archived on JSTOR, such as the Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs and Philosophical Review, there are other important journals that are not included, such as Philosophical Studies and Kant-Studien. In light of this, users may want to temper their expectations of what they will find archived on JSTOR, a complete list of which is located here.

• Searching — It is not always clear that JSTOR is searching both terms when using the Boolean operator “AND” in the Advanced Search option. If you are turning up multiple and irrelevant hits when searching, it may be more the result of JSTOR’s search algorithm than anything else.

• Using JSTOR:

• Search Options — There are three search options in JSTOR:

1. Basic Search – good for general searches to get a broad overview of a topic.
2. Advanced Search — good for more focused searching across or within disciplines.
3. Article Locator — good for locating specific articles by an author.

• Using JSTOR by itself — JSTOR works well by itself when you have a specific article that you are looking for. From the Search link, click on “Article Locator,” and enter in as much information as you know. Using this search screen will often take you right away to the article that you need, rather than having to scroll through the long lists that generally come back when using the Basic Search.

• Using JSTOR in conjunction with other databases — outside of locating specific articles, JSTOR is best used in conjunction with other databases, such as Academic Search Premier (ASP), Project MUSE, Synergy, and the like. Why? Given JSTOR’s lack of currency and limited scope, users will find their research results limited if they use it alone. Articles of potential interest that are not archived on JSTOR may never be located as a result. And, users will never locate current articles using JSTOR, though the database is now providing links to external sites providing electronic content of current issues.

A better strategy would be to use JSTOR in tandem with Philosopher’s Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, to develop a bibliography of potentially useful research. Once you have these, use JSTOR along with ASP, Project Muse, and other current databases to retrieve these articles for review.

None of this is to disparage JSTOR. It is a very useful database. However, given its limitations, it is generally a good idea to use it as one tool among many in your research toolbox, rather than as the sole tool.

Please let me know what you think of this post, and if it is helpful. Next week, I will give an overview of Academic Search Premier.