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Hi class! My name is Melanie Gnau
I am going to be your librarian
and today we are going to take a look at the database, JSTOR.
So, first of all, we're going to start out
on the Wake Tech homepage.
To get to that database, we're going to go to
Current Students
Libraries
And now we're going to go here,
over on the left where it says
Research Databases.
Ok, so again you'll see that we've got our
research databases sorted by subject.
And for JSTOR, we're actually going to scroll down
here because JSTOR has a lot of different
articles in it from different subjects.
So, we are going to scroll down and
find JSTOR under "General/Multidisciplinary."
So, it's right here-- JSTOR.
So, I'm going to click on that.
And now it took me straight to JSTOR.
It took me straight to JSTOR because
I am on-campus.
If you are off-campus it is going to ask you
for a username and password.
And remember that that username and password
is the same as your Blackboard.
Now you can just do a general search here
in JSTOR like you would a Google search,
but today we're actually going to do an Advanced Search
to find exactly what we need.
So, I'm going to click on this Advanced Search here.
And now we have a lot more options.
So what we're going to do first is narrow our subject.
So we're going to narrow it by item first.
We're going to narrow it to articles.
We have the option to narrow the date if we needed to...
Publication and ISBN.
We also have the option to narrow by discipline or publication title.
So the first thing that I want to do is actually
keep it fairly broad, so at this moment I'm
not going to narrow it by dicipline.
But things that I would probably use in my search
for Emily Dickinson's religion and Puritanism
I would search for things maybe like American Studies,
Feminism and Women's Studies.
I would search maybe...
let's see what's another one...
maybe Philosophy, possibly.
I would just keep it really broad.
Languages and Literature definitely.
So those are some disciplines that we could narrow it by
But first just to start, I'm going to keep it broad
and see what we come up with.
So now, I'm going to type in Emily Dickinson
and then on the next row, I'm going to use the limiter "AND"
and I'm also going to put in religion and see what comes up.
Remember, you want to keep these boxes,
"Include only content I can access" and
"Include links". You want to keep those checked
because those are going to give you content
that you can access through your school, not just partial articles.
And then this links to external content is going to give you
a few things that might be in something like Google Scholar.
So, we're going to go ahead and click that Search.
Ok, and I got 386 search results which is pretty good.
That's a pretty good amount of search results.
But you'll notice that this is sorted by relevance which is the default
the further that you go down into your articles
like if you went to maybe page 16,
the less likely it would be that this is going
to be super related to your subject.
So the first couple of pages is probably going to
be the most related to your subject.
Now we can go ahead and take a look at these.
The one thing that I do not like about JSTOR
is that often times they don't have an abstract
associated easily with their articles.
But it requires just a little bit more reading and a little bit more searching,
but JSTOR is still a really good database.
So let's look at something like...
I kind of like the way this one sounds.
It sounds promising. The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson
because a lot of times with your inner life,
you're more contemplative--
thinking about your religion and things like that.
So maybe I'll click on this one.
Ok.
So, you'll notice that you get the PDF form of this
and you always, always, always want to use that PDF form.
Ok, so just reading the first paragraph or so,
this looks like this is of interest to me
What I would do is view this complete PDF
You're going to accept the terms and conditions.
And then you'll notice that it gives me a download of the PDF over here.
We have the option to view the citation.
Remember you always, always, always
want to check this against your style manual.
So, this is not the way the citation is exactly going to look,
so you're going to have to set that up yourself.
We've got this email citation, so you can email it to yourself if you need to.
Just going to go back.
Export citation, save citation and also track citation.
So there's a couple of different options.
Personally, my favorite is just email.
Email it to myself, and keep it.
So that search was fairly good,
We got 386 results.
But just looking at these, these weren't super--
They weren't exactly what I wanted.
So maybe I'm going to either go back or use this "Modify Search."
I just prefer the back button.
So, I'm just going to click back.
I'm also going to enter the term purit* here.
Remember if you use this asterisk,
it's going to search for things like Puritan,
Puritanism, Puritannical. It's going to search all those words that begin with Purit*.
And maybe I'll also narrow by discipline this time.
Let's see...
Let's do a couple of these.
You can always broaden it later, as well.
Let's do this Feminist and Women's Studies.
This Language and Literature definitely.
Maybe Psychology.
Religion.
Ok, that's pretty good for right now.
Let's see what comes up when we do that.
I'm going to go ahead and click this search again.
Ok, so now I got 130 results.
So, that is pretty good, as well.
I keep seeing this one, over and over,
so, I'm going to click on that one and see what it is about.
Ok, that one sounds really promising as well.
So remember with these searches, you can always go back.
You can edit them. Maybe we want to take out the narrow by discipline part.
Maybe we want to search Emily Dickinson and God instead.
Maybe we want to, you know, narrow our search even farther.
We can always do that.
It's just a matter of getting those boolean terms correct
and getting those search words that we want to search correct.
Thank you guys for watching!
If you have any questions about how to search JSTOR,
remember you can always email me
or you can talk to me in the discussion board.
Thanks bye-bye!