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Review : JSTOR
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents...............................................................................3
1.0Summary......................................................................................4
Introduction.......................................................................................4
Findings............................................................................................4
3.1 Scope........................................................................................................... 4
3.2 Availability................................................................................................... 5
3.3 Basic search facilities...................................................................................5
3.4 Special features...........................................................................................7
3.6 Personal evaluation......................................................................................7
4.0 Conclusion...................................................................................8
5.0 Sources........................................................................................9
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1.0 Summary
This report will review the online service of JSTOR. It will report on the scope of the
resource, its availability, its use (including search facilities and special features) as
well as problems and disadvantages of using the JSTOR. Finally, the review will
compare the JSTOR service with a similar resource, and will close with an evaluation
Introduction
JSTOR is a not-for-profit archive based in the United States. Its archives include
academic journals (and other materials) from the humanities, sciences and social
sciences.
Findings
3.1 Scope
from 50 disciplines. It contains over 1400 journals, the earliest holdings date from
the late seventeenth century (JSTOR holds the journal Philosophical Transactions
from 1683-1775) and while the ‘moving wall’ differs for each journal, some holdings
current to within a few years.1 These journals are all held in fully searchable format,
so that users can search the full-text of any journal in JSTOR’s holdings.
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JSTOR defines the ‘moving wall’ as the “time period between the last
issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a
journal”. (JSTOR,
jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/journals/movingWall.jsp, accessed 09
May 2009)
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3.2 Availability
—nor available to—the generalist user, as the journals contained in the resource are
JSTOR does offer search facilities to the general user (or the non-logged-in
academic user). This is available both through the jstor.org website and through
JSTOR offers both and advanced search and basic search function—both allow
Boolean operators, but the simple search also allows users to search the database
The basic search function allows Boolean operators such as AND OR and NOT,
allows quotation marks, and it also allows the search to be limited to journals
grouped within discipline (there are over 50 disciplines listed, each of which
searches between 1 title (Library Science) and 214 titles (Biological Science)).
The advanced search (available through a tab located adjacent to the default ‘Basic
including:
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Sciences) or titles within those disciplines (ie, The Phylon Quarterly and
As well as these search options, JSTOR also allows the user to browse for articles.
This is organised by discipline, title and publisher. When either browsing or limiting
a search by journal, JSTOR gives the dates of its holdings of that journal; when
information for the title including (examples are for the North Central Journal of
Agricultural Economics):
• The ‘JSTOR collections’ in which this journal is included (such as the ‘For-
Profit Academic Business II Collection’, and ‘Arts & Sciences VII Collection’.
journals in a collection.)
‘Economics’ in the case of this title. As with collections, these disciplines are
hyperlinked to pages listing all other constituent journals within the discipline.)
• Predecessor and successor journals in the JSTOR collection (in this case,
The user can browse issues of the journal, by clicking on the decade in which they
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would like to see an issue, which leads to a page listing individual issues of the
articles turned up by searches, and how to store the article itself. One feature that it
offers is to save any article in PDF format on a local drive, easily and quickly in order
Korean.
JSTOR also displays the citation information (although not the article full-text) for
The two great benefits of the JSTOR database are its scope and its usability. As
long as a user is conducting research within one of the disciplines in which JSTOR’s
holdings are fairly comprehensive (the service holds more than 100 journal titles in
each of the following disciplines: Art & Art History; Biological Sciences; Business;
History; Language & Literature), many of the articles used in research are likely to be
held by JSTOR. In that respect, this electronic information resource can almost
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come to be considered to be the first ‘port of call’ for academic journals by many
The website is extremely well designed, with most metadata hyperlinked to pages
containing similar journals (see the explanation of the ‘browse’ function, above). The
clean and functional website design, however, is just the front-end for an extremely
4.0 Conclusion
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5.0 Sources
JSTOR – jstor.org
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Word count:
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