Mastering JSTOR: Essential Search Tips for Effective Academic Research (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Quick search tips from JSTOR. There's a lot of great content to be discovered on JSTOR. Over 10 million items that include book chapters, journal articles, images, and other primary and secondary sources. You'll get the best results sorting through all that content if you learn a few tips and tricks. JSTOR isn't Google. Google is designed to find quick answers to very specific questions. While JSTOR and other academic databases are designed for a scholarly research process, where you may need to run multiple searches and refine your results. Here we are on JSTOR. We have three different ways to begin. Basic search is available in the search box at the top of any page. Advanced search and image search are available from the search dropdown in the global navigation. Advanced search guides you through the creation of a multi-term search. Image search allows you to look just for images, and basic search is useful for getting started with any kind of content. JSTOR continually releases new content and features, so your view may not exactly match the examples in this recording. Here we are back on the JSTOR homepage. Before you get started, you should know that results may vary depending on whether you're logged in through a participating institution or not logged in at all. If you're not logged in, your search might yield content not immediately available to you through that institution. If you don't see the name of your school at the top of the page, log in from that institution before getting started. If you're new to academic research, we have four recommendations for you. Put exact phrases in quotation marks. When applicable, narrow your search from the search box. Narrow your image search by categories related to images. And use the dropdown menus in advanced search to control how your search terms relate to each other. Now let's go over each of these tips with a brief demonstration. To make your search more effective, put exact phrases in quotation marks. When you enter any search term into basic search, you're running a full text and image keyword search. So, if you're searching for an exact phrase, put quotation marks around it. This gives you results containing the words in that exact order. In some situations, you can narrow your search from the search box. If you're looking for a specific author, title, publication name, or an image of something specific, you can narrow your search by categories if you choose one of the search term fields that appear in the dropdown menu as you type your search terms. If you're searching just for images, narrow your image search by categories related to images. Here on the image search page, using the refine results sidebar, you can narrow by date, classification, by country, or by collection. And finally, use the dropdown menus in advanced search to control how your search terms relate to each other. Here on the advanced search page, advanced search gives you the options to choose Boolean operators and fielded searches from these dropdown menus. Employing these while you construct your search will help you to narrow to just the content you need. Finally, ask your librarian if you're having any trouble at any point in the research process. They are trained to help people find information, and they're ready to help you. Join us for other videos where we'll explore ways to do research on JSTOR in more detail. If you have any questions, use the Support button to navigate to that page or contact us at support at jstor.org. Thanks for joining me today. Happy searching.