JSTOR is a valuable research resource for secondary resources. You can use it to search and find the full text of published books and journal articles.
Use the How to Search JSTOR LibGuide for an introduction to the service or take a look at JSTOR's Vimeo channel for educational and instructional videos.
Use the link below for quick access, and remember you can access it through the A-Z Databases list .
Enter your search.
You can use the Basic search box that appears at login.
Alternatively, select the Advanced Search option for additional options
The example below shows a basic search for book and article content that includes reference to marlowe and shakespeare and ambiguity
View your search results
You can Refine your results if you find too many as a result of your initial search.
You may find it useful to select the Show Snippets option. This will highlight the appearance of your search terms
Click on the title of the journal article/book/book chapter to view the item.
You can download the item.
You can also see how many times your search terms appear across the article and link through to the pages where the terms appear, via the View Results link.
JSTOR also has a number of developmental project services that enhance research capabilities.
Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library. This research tool allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare's plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them - line by line.
Users simply click next to any line of text in a play and relevant articles from the JSTOR archive immediately load.
Explore the collection here.
Here is an example from Richard III
There are 17 articles within JSTOR with reference to the first line of the play
The Text Analyzer is another useful research tool.
You can upload or drag and drop a file into the search box and the Analyzer tool will analyse the keywords and then produce a list of JSTOR items that match those keywords. You can even use your phone to photograph some text and upload that for analysis! This service is not perfect but you can improve its use as a bibliographic research tool by adding additional keywords, and ranking their importance.
You need a fairly significant piece of text to benefit from this tool, but you can drop in all sorts of files such as an assignment, work based report or journal article you are working on. You will get mismatches and it will work better with some searches than other, but if you are struggling to retrieve content from your usual search strategies, why not see if this helps.
Find out more about it here.
This brief introductory video will give you an overview of the tool.
University of Exeter LibGuide is licensed under CC BY 4.0
