JSTOR: Introduction

This presentation will cover how to use one of our research databases, JSTOR,
to locate scholarly journals and articles. If you would like to access JSTOR or
find out more about the Learning Commons please contact us or visit us at
the URL listed below.

Before we begin it might be helpful to know what JSTOR is and what kind of
information you are likely to find here. JSTOR is a shortening of Journal
Storage and is a substantial research database for arts and humanities
information drawn from various academic and peer-reviewed journals. There
are no newspaper items, trade publications, magazine articles, or anything of
the kind in JSTOR. Here you will find only academic and peer-reviewed
journals on various topics in the arts and humanities field. In addition, all of
the articles that appear in JSTOR are full-text PDFs as they appeared in the
original print publications.

Similar to some of the other research databases provided through the

Learning Commons, JSTOR also has a personal account feature you can
create, which will help you keep an online space of articles you wish to save
and reference later. If you are curious about setting up a personal account in
JSTOR simply visit the MyJSTOR area off of the global navigation bar.

I am going to go ahead and sign into MyJSTOR account and I will show you
how you can use this feature in conjunction with your research process.

When accessing JSTOR you will see the basic search box similar to a Google
search box. Here you can perform a basic keyword search across all journal
content in the JSTOR aggregated database.

For example, I will do a keyword search of Inuit. As you can see I have a
significant number of results based on this search. Note that some of these
citations are marked as Reviews. This simply means that these articles are
going to be book reviews. Perhaps I don’t want reviews to appear in my
search results. What I am really looking for is articles on the Inuit people and
their art objects.

This time I am going to select the Advanced Search tab up here and create
a better structured search. I enter Inuit. This time I am going to check the
box for Article and also restrict my search results to English language
materials. I click Search and I have significantly reduced my results simply
by being more specific. It also stripped out all those Reviews we had seen in
the previous results.

Also, in the tabs at the top I have access to images in JSTOR, as well as
ARTstor. The JSTOR tab pulls PDFs from the journals where images appear to
illustrate the content. So if we appropriately cite the source of our image we
could potentially use one of these images as an illustration in our research
paper.

But wait, there’s more! There is also an ARTstor tab that pulls in some of the
images from this image database. You can do a cross-database search all in
one area. Selecting the ARTstor tab shows you the images that are available
on Inuit in this image database. When you select one of the images a new
window will open and launch the image in a new browser. If you are accessing
JSTOR from off-campus you may have to log in to ARTstor separately in order
to look at the corresponding images.
Connect @ The Learning Commons
Website: http://lwtclearningcommons.com
Technology Center
Lake Washington Technical College
11605 132nd Avenue NE | Kirkland, WA 98034
 JSTOR: Introduction
There is one final piece to the JSTOR research database. You might come to
JSTOR only wanting to look at a specific publication or specific discipline.

If you navigate to the global navigation bar up here at the top you will select
Browse and then by Discipline. Within this view you also have the option of
browsing by title or publisher. Here is a comprehensive listing of the journals
housed in JSTOR. In this view the journals are arranged by discipline, so you
can see the various journals for Architecture & Architectural History, for
instance.

Going back to our Advanced Search we can try our Inuit search again and
limit it to Article and English language from the drop-down box. This time
we are going to search only within specific disciplines rather than all of the
journals in JSTOR. We select Anthropology, Art & Art History, Folklore,
and History. Hit Search.

Again, we have a more manageable body of results to work with by being

more specific about what we are looking for and where we wish to look for it.

I am going to select some of the results for my search and then navigate
back up to the top and select Save Citations. I can look at my results by
going to MyJSTOR or by clicking on the link below my name up here in the
right hand corner of the window.

I wanted to mention one last thing about JSTOR. If we go back to the home
page to launch another search we can look at some of our previous searches
that may or may not have worked. As long as we stay in our session it will
save these search terms for you until you have logged out of the session or
out of your account. So you can always backtrack if for some reason a series
of search terms is not working.

This online tutorial has covered how to use JSTOR to locate scholarly journals
and articles. If you have any questions about this online tutorial or need
further assistance with using JSTOR please contact us.

Connect @ The Learning Commons

Website: http://lwtclearningcommons.com
Technology Center
Lake Washington Technical College
11605 132nd Avenue NE | Kirkland, WA 98034