This section is limited to digital archives that include journals from more than a single publisher. Several publishers (e.g., Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Blackwell) maintain their own archives, and several vendors (especially EBSCO [I512] and ProQuest [I519]) offer access to a substantial number of titles. The lack of a common standard for indexing journal issues can frustrate searchers. Some tables of contents include an abstract; some do not distinguish between articles and reviews; some do not identify the author of the book reviewed; some are inconsistent from volume to volume about how and what information is supplied; some do not list separately reviews (requiring that a searcher open and skim the HTML or PDF text of the entire review section); some do not provide a full citation on the first page of the HTML or PDF text of an article; some do not include front matter or back matter that appears in the print version of an issue. For an important discussion of problems involved in searching full-text archives of secondary material, see John W. East, ““Subject Retrieval from Full-Text Databases in the Humanities”,” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 7.2 (2007): 227–41.
Most publishers and vendors allow users to set tables-of-contents alerts.
JSTOR. ITHAKA, 2000– . 26 Aug. 2013. <http://www.jstor.org>. Updated regularly.
A digital archive of more than 2,500 journals, with individual issues typically added three to five years after publication and with the goal of offering a complete back file for each journal. Some journals provide links to current issues and, since 2011, some publishers submit current issues. Unfortunately, a few publishers have stopped allowing new issues to be added (for a list see About/Content & Collections/Journals–Archive Collections/Complete List; journals with Fixed in the Moving Wall column no longer add issues). Journals can be browsed by discipline, publisher, or alphabetically by title. JSTOR has a growing list of primary collections and scholarly books. Search allows keyword searches of citations and full text. Advanced Search allows users to limit a search to one or more fields (full text, author, title, caption, abstract), to one or more types (article, review, miscellaneous, pamphlet), to a date range, to a language, to content included in an institution’s subscription, and to one or more publication titles or disciplines. Citation Locator allows users to search by title, author, journal title, ISSN, volume, issue, start page, and date. Results can be sorted by relevance or date (ascending or descending). Searches can be saved to MyJSTOR and used to create an alert. A record allows users to go directly to a page scan, PDF file, summary, page thumbnails, citation (which includes a stable URL for the document); to go to a page that includes a search term; and to e-mail, export, track, or save a citation. JSTOR offers full-text searching of several important language and literature journals and remedies some of the major frustrations of working with printed volumes (incomplete runs and missing, misshelved, or vandalized volumes).
Project Muse (Muse). Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. 26 Aug. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu>. Updated weekly.
A digital archive of more than 500 journals and several thousand scholarly books in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. For journals that also appear in print, Muse digitizes all content except advertisements and covers. Users can limit a keyword search to books or journals or browse by research area, all titles, publisher, books, or journals. Results—which can be ordered chronologically (ascending or descending) or by relevance rank and which can be filtered (e.g., by content type, subject, author, language, and documents included in an institution’s collection)—can be marked for saving, printing, e-mailing, or exporting citations. Users can sign up for alerts and RSS feeds (click Tools). Records include a link to HTML or PDF files; users should note that books must be downloaded chapter by chapter. Like JSTOR (K700), Project Muse offers full-text searching of several important language and literature journals and books and remedies some of the major frustrations of working with printed volumes (incomplete runs and missing, misshelved, or vandalized volumes).
IngentaConnect Complete. Publishing Technology, 2013. 26 Aug. 2013. <http://www.ingentaconnect.com>. Updated daily.
A bibliographic database that indexes and provides full-text access to several million articles, book chapters, and books covering a wide spectrum of fields and published, for the most part, since 1991. Search allows users to limit basic keyword searches of citations to article title, publication title, author, subscribed titles, index terms, and abstract. Advanced Search allows users to combine searches of author; index terms; abstract; publication title; ISSN, ISBN, or DOI; full text; volume; and issue and to limit searches to documents included in an institution’s subscription. Users can also browse documents by publication title, subject area, or publisher. Records (which can be sorted by relevance or date [ascending or descending]) can be marked for exporting or e-mailing. Users can save searches and create alerts. Although coverage of the arts and humanities is not particularly broad, IngentaConnect is useful for identifying articles in journals not covered by the literature bibliographies in section G.