Advanced Searching in JSTOR at The University of Alabama Libraries
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2018-06-27

This video demonstrates some of the powerful advanced searching features in JSTOR, a database for the humanities and social sciences. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, my name is Megan and I’m a librarian at the University of Alabama. 

This video will demonstrate how to use the various advanced search features of JSTOR, a database of scholarly resources for the social sciences, humanities, and modern languages. 

JSTOR’s advanced search is a powerful tool that can be very helpful for finding resources for your papers. 

You navigate to JSTOR’s advanced search by selecting “advanced search” on the JSTOR homepage. Like other advanced searches, JSTOR allows you to search by author and title, though it also allows you to search by abstract or caption. 

An abstract is a summary of an academic article, and searching via abstract can help you narrow down to resources that mention your keywords within their abstracts. A caption is the short description of an image, graph, or chart, and can help you find an article with a specific image. 

For example, if I run a Caption search for American photographer Ansel Adams, I get a manageable 140 results, though JSTOR does warn that not all of their captions are searchable. A quick click through of the first few results show the reprint of one of Adams’ photographs within the article. 

If you use a field limiter, such as caption, abstract, title, or author, JSTOR advanced search has a quirk – you will have to restart a search instead of changing it within the search results. 

Most of you have run a Boolean search before, using the Boolean of “AND” to link to keywords together, such as “Alabama AND football.” For this next example, I’m going to use the “OR” Boolean, which allows me to have two search terms, but results will return for resources with either of them. Think “With OR Without You.”

I’m researching the history of Ukraine, so I’m going to search for journal articles on the capital city, [Keev]. Because of Keev’s history, the city can be spells as K-I-E-V [Kiev] or K-Y-I-V [Kyiv]. K-I-E-V is the Russian transliteration, and was the official transliteration until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. [Kyiv] K-Y-I-V is the Ukrainian transliteration, and is the current official transliteration. 

Since this is a search to find out what JSTOR holds, I’m going to change the “Content I Can Access” to “All Content.” This means that I will be able to see everything that JSTOR has on Keev. However, I might not be able to access all of it, and will have to request something from InterLibrary Loan, ILLiad, via the Full-text finder Icon in the results. 

In the “Basic searching in JSTOR” video, I covered the date and content type limiters. Under advanced search, there are a few more content types, as JSTOR is expanding their holdings in primary sources. 

Before we get to the subject limiters, you can limit by language, or the journal title, if you know it. 

Speaking of journals, on the Advanced Search page, is a long list of “disciplines,” which contain specific journal titles; while they are referred to by JSTOR as “disciplines,” they appear to follow the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

You can select an entire discipline or any number of journals within a discipline. 

Please remember that, when narrowing by discipline, you run the risk of narrowing down your results to the point of exclusion, such as removing journals in one subject area that could be useful. 

JSTOR has a feature that allows you to see the topics associated with an article or book chapter. When you click on one, it takes you to what appears to be a curated collection of articles and book chapters about that topic. These topics are very useful for finding similar resources on the same topic, as you can search within the topics to narrow down your results. 

That’s all for now, thank you for watching. If you have further questions, you can call us, text us, or visit ask.lib.ua.edu to Ask-A-Librarian.