Robbins Library Notes

Good afternoon! Today, I’ll be looking at Project MUSE, a useful database for research in the humanities, the social sciences, and mathematics.

What it is

As its Web site notes, Project MUSE is “a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers.

MUSE began in 1993 as a pioneering joint project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at JHU. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed MUSE to go live with JHU Press journals in 1995. Journals from other publishers were first incorporated in 2000, with additional university press and scholarly society publishers joining in each subsequent year.”

Strengths

• Project MUSE is very strong in the humanities, social sciences and mathematics. This database is an excellent addition to databases such as JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, and the like.
• The Advanced Search option allows you to include back issues on JSTOR in your search.

Limitations

• The above being stated, Project MUSE’s collection of philosophy-related periodicals is limited at present, totaling only 22 journals. Most of the included journals have a very limited number of back issues in this database, though this is offset by the inclusion of JSTOR back issues in the Advanced Search option that I outlined above.

Using Project MUSE

1. Go to the HOLLIS search page, and select the “Digital Resources” tab.
2. Set the “Search type” to “Title beginning with,” and the search terms to “project muse.”
3. In the results list, scroll down to “project muse,” and click on that link.
4. Clink on the Internet link in the record, and login with your ID and PIN.
5. When you get to the home page, you will see an alphabetical list of all the journals available on Project MUSE, which you can scroll through and browse. The second row at the top of the page also gives you the option of sorting the journals by subject and by “Collection,” i.e.: Standard Collection; Basic Research Collection; Basic Undergraduate Collection; Arts and Humanities Collection; and Social Sciences Collection. I wouldn’t worry too much about these options, as they are more for librarians and bibliographers who might only want to purchase those parts of the Project MUSE database that are relevant for their patrons.
6. Searching. You have two options for searching in Project MUSE:
   1. Basic Search. This is the default search option. I have found this search to be of limited use, except for very general searches.
   2. Advanced Search. This is my preferred search, and the one that I recommend that you use most often.
7. Search results. If your search returns results, they will come up showing basic bibliographic information, and the option to view the article(s) in HTML or in PDF. You will also have the option of looking at your search term(s) in context, which may help you determine if an article is relevant or not.
8. Results. You can e-mail your results to yourself, or export them to bibliographic management software by clicking on the relevant button. You’ll be asked to save the desired results first before you do so.
9. Things to note when searching:
   1. Including JSTOR Back Issues. As I noted in the Strengths section above, you can include JSTOR back issues in the Advanced Search by checking off the box right under the boxes where you enter in your search term(s).
   2. Limiting by Article Type. You can limit your search to Article, Review, Poetry, Fiction, or Drama.
   3. Limiting by Journals. You have the option to search by Muse Titles Available at Your Institution, All Muse Titles, and All Muse Titles by Subject. This can be useful if you want to search only philosophy journals, for example.
   4. Sorting. There are five sorting options: Relevance; Date, Latest First; Date, Earliest First; Journal, A-Z; and Journal, Z-A. The Relevance category is the default category, but I’ve never quite been able to figure out how the database determines what is relevant or not. My suggestion is to use reverse chronological order, i.e., Date, Latest First, as your default for sorting your results, unless your search strategy suggests otherwise.
   5. Search History. Finally, you’ll be able to view and modify your search history and strategy by clicking on this button, which will be in the third row at the top of page, to the right of the first two rows.

Summary

Project MUSE is a good secondary database to have in your research toolkit. On its own, it’s of secondary value, but, used in conjunction with some of the other databases that I’ve reviewed over the last two months, it can fill in some areas that might be missed.

I am thinking of looking at Lexis Nexis Academic next week, focusing on its legal resources for those interested in philosophy of law and politics.