Hi Tumblr researchers,

As promised, we’re going to dive into some best practices for searching on JSTOR. This’ll be a long one!

The first thing to note is that JSTOR is not Google, so searches should not be conducted in the same way.

More on that in this video:

Basic Search on JSTOR

• To search for exact phrases, enclose the words within quotation marks, like “to be or not to be”.
• To construct a more effective search, utilize Boolean operators, such as “tea trade” AND china.

Advanced Searching on JSTOR

• Utilize the drop-down menus to refine your search parameters, limiting them to the title, author, abstract, or caption text.
• Combine search terms using Boolean operators like AND/OR/NOT and NEAR 5/10/25. The NEAR operator finds keyword combinations within 5, 10, or 25 words of each other. It applies only when searching for single keyword combinations, such as “cat NEAR 5 dog,” but not for phrases like “domesticated cat” NEAR 5 dog.
• Utilize the “Narrow by” options to search for articles exclusively, include/exclude book reviews, narrow your search to a specific time frame or language.
• To focus your article search on specific disciplines and titles, select the appropriate checkboxes. Please note that discipline searching is currently limited to journal content, excluding ebooks from the search.

Finding Content You Have Access To

To discover downloadable articles, chapters, and pamphlets for reading, you have the option to narrow down your search to accessible content. Simply navigate to the Advanced Search page and locate the “Select an access type” feature, which offers the following choices:

All Content will show you all of the relevant search results on JSTOR, regardless of whether or not you can access it.

Content I can access will show you content you can download or read online. This will include Early Journal Content and journals/books publishers have made freely available.

Once you’ve refined your search, simply select an option that aligns with your needs and discover the most relevant items. Additionally, you have the option to further narrow down your search results after conducting an initial search. Look for this option located below the “access type” checkbox, situated at the bottom left-hand side of the page.

Additional resources

For more search recommendations, feel free to explore this page on JSTOR searching. There, you will find information on truncation, wildcards, and proximity, using fields, and metadata hyperlinks.

Originally posted by my-harry-potter-generation

Oh hey, haven’t done one of these in awhile, and the time is right… considering that half of the JSTOR staff is re-reading all of the Harry Potter books in order, as full-fledged adults. 

To recap: In our JSTOR: Beyond the Book series, we take popular fiction or trade nonfiction books and point you to helpful articles on JSTOR that could enhance your reading experience. If you’re into that sort of thing. Previous entries include:

1. Infinite Jest  by David Foster Wallace

2. Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy (for Reblog Book Club)

3. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

4. Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

5. Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Since the JSTOR dash is basically Harry Potter and Stucky fanfic, I’ll skip the recap. So! Want to read some scholarly research on The Boy Who Lived? Let’s go:

• Origins of magic: review of genetic and epigenetic effects from BMJ: British Medical Journal. BMJ does these oddly specific mock-diagnoses of fictional conditions (another interesting one is a mental assessment of Gollum) that are kind of cool! 
  
• Wizarding in the Classroom: Teaching Harry Potter and Politics from Political Science and Politics 
• The Harry Potter Stories and French Arthurian Romance from Arthuriana

Hope this enhances your understanding of the books! Go forth and be sorted. 

Who is the only sitting justice of the Supreme Court not (yet) to have an authored article on JSTOR? (Hint but not really because you don’t know me: I saw this justice on the street one day. There was much excited squealing on my part.) To win:

1. Follow the JSTOR Tumblr.
2. Reply to this post with your guess.

The first person to answer correctly gets a free JSTOR tote bag!