JSTOR : A guide for psychology literature search

Prepared by
Ria
Need Help !
I hope this helps in making use of this database a little easier! If you have any questions, you are more than welcome to email me – 21jspc-rabraham@jgu.edu.in
Introduction
Did you know that JGU has provided us with so many wonderful resources that are literally at the tip of your fingers? As a student, it is inevitable that you would need to do research and study independently outside of your classroom, making full use of the resources that are available to you. There are many research databases available on the internet that have organized various collections of computerized information of articles, books, multimedia, etc. to retrieve the necessary information.

One such database used extensively by the humanities and social sciences courses is JSTOR.
How to access it? Let’s find out!
  1. Go to http://library.jgu.edu.in/content/digital-resources.
  2. In the alphabetically listed databases, go to the J and click on JSTOR.
    1. When you click on [Info], it will direct you to -> http://library.jgu.edu.in/node/95 where you can see the information uploaded by our Library on JSTOR.
  3. It will lead you to the JSTOR website - https://www.jstor.org/
Librarians

Abid Fakhre Alam

M Madhan

Coverage
Now, an important question after landing on the website is… what type of psychological content (or really, any subject you want to explore) you can find on this site?
There are mainly two types of content you will find –
  1. Academic Content.
    1. Journals.
    2. Book chapters.
    3. Research reports.
  2. Primary Source content (original contents as published).
    1. Serials.
    2. Documents.
    3. Books.
    4. Images (examples below).
Subject Coverage
The best point about this database is the multidisciplinary content you will find resources on many topics, illustrated by this mind map created with the use of MindMup
How to find these resource?
These useful resources you can find easily by the use of many filters the database comes with such as –
  1. Relevance by date, broad classification (Humanities and Social Sciences).
  2. Collection (Course Catalogs, Bulletins, Catalogs, Records and Collections by specific Universities).
  3. Images (Psychologist, instruments used in experiments, pictures of experiments conducted, case study pictures, etc.)
Refine the search result
You can also refine the results that you get from the left part of your screen –

How to do the advanced search?
A great tool to make use of is the Advanced Search which you will find on the home screen of this website – https://www.jstor.org/


Different ways to search
  1. Keywords.
    1. Search by Author name.
    2. Item Title.
    3. Abstract.
    4. Caption.
      1. You can add as many search boxes as you like!
  2. You can narrow your results by the following parameters –
    1. Item type.
      1. Articles.
      2. Reviews.
      3. Books.
      4. Research reports.
      5. Miscellaneous.
    2. Language.
      1. Note: Currently Hindi is NOT available but you can find some other languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, etc.
    3. Publication Date.
    4. Journal or Book Title.
    5. ISBN.
      1. Journal Filter
        • By discipline or journal
JSTOR Libguide
Aside from the many resources available on this site, one thing you definitely wouldn’t want to miss is the guides it provides such as –
  1. Research Basics (videos & content knowledge on how to do research).
  2. LibGuides – JSTOR understanding series
    1. Check any literary work and get to know what research article is referencing it.
This can be found when you scroll to the bottom of the website –




Text Analyzer
One new tool that has been added to this site is called Tool Analyzer which you can access from the top right corner of your screen –

From here, researchers can search for content on JSTOR just by uploading a document that may have already been saved on their device. This could be –
  • Paper you’re writing, outline of your Work in Progress, Article you downloaded, picture of page of textbook.
This tool analyzes text within the uploaded document to find key topics and terms used in it. These key topics and terms are called as “prioritized items” – contents which the AI deemed as being important.
Once it filters those prioritized items, it will show you similar content that is available on JSTOR. You can review these results, download Open Access material and even adjust the results by adding, removing or adjusting importance of these chosen prioritized terms.