Equipping students with strong research skills is crucial for their academic success and lifelong learning. This page offers a variety of practical tools to help you guide your students in developing these essential competencies.
Teach core research and writing skills
In a series of articles on JSTOR Daily, Nicole Donawho, professor of history at a community college in North Texas, outlines strategies for helping students develop analytic and scholarly questioning skills, summarize scholarly works, and learn how to complete an academic research project.
Asking Scholarly Questions with JSTOR Daily
Help students develop analytic and scholarly questioning skills using a quick activity built on JSTOR Daily roundups and syllabi.
Teaching Summary Skills with JSTOR Daily
Helping students to summarize scholarly works starts with getting them to ask the right questions about the material and the purpose of the exercise.
Scaffolding a Research Project with JSTOR
Use JSTOR resources and this five-step process to help students learn how to complete a scholarly research project.
Getting started
Share these resources with your students to help them effectively navigate JSTOR and build skills such as using advanced search techniques, using workspace tools to save and organize research, and citing their sources.
- How to use JSTOR (LibGuide)
- How to create a JSTOR account–for anyone! (video)
- Slide decks you can copy and use to introduce students to:
- Research on JSTOR (Google Slides)
- Images on JSTOR (Google Slides)
Searching
Novice researchers often struggle with constructing effective search strategies and may feel overwhelmed by the volume of results. These short video tutorials provide students with practical guidance on refining their searches to find the most relevant content quickly.
Peer review
Students often ask whether all the content on JSTOR is peer reviewed. Nearly all journals on JSTOR are peer-reviewed, but the archives also contain primary sources and content that predates today’s standard peer-review process. However, all content on JSTOR is considered scholarly content.
- Peer Reviewed Content on JSTOR (LibGuide)
Interactive research tool
Developed in collaboration with our community, this tool employs generative AI and other technologies to empower people to deepen and expand their research with JSTOR’s trusted corpus.
Citations
JSTOR’s citation tool simplifies research workflows and helps students cite their sources correctly. The tool automatically generates citations in your choice of MLA, Chicago, or APA styles. The tool also supports exports to various citation managers.
- Exporting Citations from JSTOR (how-to)
Organizing research
The JSTOR Workspace offers an efficient way for students to track their research. It’s easy to organize items into folders, make notes about each source, and export reference lists.
- A Tour of the JSTOR Workspace (video)
- Organizing and Presenting Research (how-to)
Citation trails
Introduce students to an effective research method: using citation trails. JSTOR’s “Cited by” feature on item pages automatically displays content that cites that item, allowing students to find highly relevant sources, understand the broader academic context of their research topic, and follow the scholarly conversation.
Jump-start research skills with a self-guided course
JSTOR’s free and open self-paced course is designed to help college-bound high school students and first-year college students learn academic research skills. Course topics include effective searching, evaluating credibility, and properly citing sources.
Students will encounter three learning modules divided into lessons. First, they’ll watch short videos to learn about particular research concepts; then, they’ll practice a few activities before moving ahead. Upon completion of a module, learners take a brief assessment to gauge their understanding.
The course can be found at guides.jstor.org/researchbasics. Please share this URL with your students. The site also offers an instructional guide for educators.
Introduce text analysis with Constellate
Text analysis allows students to uncover patterns and insights in large collections of texts, enhancing their data literacy and critical thinking abilities. Constellate, a text analysis platform, offers tools and support to help you confidently teach this advanced research method to your students. It facilitates the entire text analysis process—from content exploration and dataset creation to analysis—and provides free classes and expert support.
Getting started is easy: you can create an account, join our webinars, and begin working with datasets and creating visualizations for free. For more advanced features, recommend the Pedagogy Package to your library; free trials are available.
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Image credits: 1. Quiringh van Brekelenkam. Life of a Student (Scène d’intimité; La vie studieuse) (detail). 1662. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille. 2. Getty. 3. Getty. 4. Getty.