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Rider University Library

Databases: Choosing & Using

Learn how to find which library databases are the best for searching on your topic and how to use the databases to your advantage--saving you time and energy!

JSTOR & Project MUSE

JSTOR contains the full text of articles published in approximately 430 journals from the fields of arts and sciences, and business. Its archive spans from the first volume of the journal to within the past three to five years of the journal.

  • Use Advanced Search and limit to a specific discipline under “Discipline(s) and/or Title(s)”. 
  • See “Searching JSTOR” under “Help” or click the "Search Help" link in the Advanced Search tab to learn the operators to make your keyword searching more effective.
  • Use Journal Holdings if a recent or current issue is not full-text in JSTOR to see whether we have access to it in print or another database.

 

 

 

Search Project MUSE®

 
Project MUSE is "a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community," covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
 
Project MUSE includes the full content of each journal and ebooks from university presses and other scholarly publishers.

As of January 2012, Project Muse also indexes ebooks, but Rider University Libraries may not have access to these titles as ebooks.

JSTOR and Project MUSE are full text collections of certain scholarly journals spanning the disciplines and not comprehensive or specialized (discipline-specific) bibliographic databases.

What does this mean for me?

  • (Almost) All of the articles are full text--and you can search the full text!
  • You can search across disciplines, but be aware that you are searching a selected number of journals. It is important to use subject-specific bibliographic databases, where there may be more citations for your subject. They also have better indexing.
  • JSTOR provides full text keyword searching only. This means that you can not search by subject in a designated subject field. Therefore, you may wade through hundreds of results that are not relevant.  Your results will be as good as your query.  For effective searching in JSTOR, visit  Help and read “Searching JSTOR” to learn power commands and operators to increase relevancy.
  • Project Muse offers faceted browsing (browsing by category) of results, to further refine your search.

 

Project Muse and JSTOR also index ebooks, but Rider University Libraries may not have access to these titles as ebooks.