Research Guides: HIST 301: The Historian's Craft (Schechter, Fall 2023): Secondary Sources: Why Specialized Databases Matter

Compare the results of these databases

Lets' say my topic is women's education in Virginia , so I try the search:
Women AND education AND Virginia

Women AND education AND virginia in America: History & Life
Provides full text coverage of the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes nearly 200 journals and 100 books, selective indexing for over 1,700 journals, and abstracts in English of foreign language articles.
Women AND education AND virginia in ERIC
ERIC is a database for "All aspects of education, including educational research and theory. Journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, some books. Vendor: Education Resources Information Center."
Women AND education AND virginia in PRIMO
PRIMO searches about 60% of all our databases
Women AND education AND virginia in GoogleScholar
GoogleScholar crawls most of the internet.
Many results are NOT peer reviewed, and some of the results on results page two are from scam journals.

When to use JSTOR?

JSTOR Is an outstanding resource that puts thousands of journals in one place.
It is not a good place to start a search because it has no indexing. So our search above would not be useful.

If you are looking for a specific institution, though, like Valley Union Seminary (the earliest Women's academy in Virginia) it may be useful.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary full-text journal articles from 1,500 major journals. Please note: In many cases, JSTOR does not include the most recent 3 to 5 years of these journals. Please use other databases to retrieve recent articles, especially for current events topics. Coverage: Varies by title. Access is available to 2007+ alumni; requires W&M userid and password.