#using jstor

Hints on Doing Research (online and off)

Thank you! I quite enjoy the opportunity here to do what’s called public or public-facing history. Ironically, y’all on Tumblr have made me an (even bigger) advocate of it because you ask such excellent questions on a wealth of matters where I can yatter on about the importance of historiography, etc. When I tell my colleagues, they tend to stare in disbelief—if pleased disbelief. It’s what led me to start the YouTube channel, as well. I’m not sure how much overlap in audience there is, but I’ve discovered some folks don’t like to read and prefer to listen while others (me included) prefer to read. So it reaches both sorts of audiences … if a rather niche audience.

In any case, it’s always nice to hear that folks appreciate these write-ups, especially as some (like this one) get lengthy. Now, to your question about AI and doing research…

Some bits of generic advice that a surprising number of folks don’t realize:

Bibliographies are your friends. But with a caveat…bibliographies list anything the author cites, even if that author disagrees with it. That’s good! It means you can find a variety of voices on a topic. So, once you find a (relatively recent) book or article on your topic of interest, always check the bibliography for more sources.

Indexes are your friends (as is the table of contents or TOC). If you want to hone in on highly specific topics (like, say, Hephaistion), check a book’s index. You can eliminate some just by looking at the TOC and index. BUT indexes work better with print books. Personally, I find them a pain in the ass for PDFs. So, this is a trick for a physical library, sitting in front of the shelves (DF200s for Alexander and Macedonia, btw. 😉) Unfortunately, and increasingly, libraries are ditching physical copies and only purchasing rights to ebooks. This fucks up an extremely useful analog way to research (see below).

Footnotes are your friends. I’m regularly surprised by how many students, even grad students, ignore the footnotes. Dudes and dudettes...that’s where the juicy stuff is: the in-field drama, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) disses…etc. If you read footnotes, you learn a ton about the directions, and parameters, of current research. Is someone’s work cited a lot? Especially with respect to a topic or question that interests you? Go to the bibliography and tag that book or article, so you can run it down for yourself.

The cutting-edge research usually appears in article or book-chapter form first. So rushing to pull a bunch of biographies on Alexander (or Philip, or Macedonia) won’t tell you where research is right now. It’ll tell you where it was 10, 20, even 30 years ago. Check EDITED COLLECTIONS and JOURNALS.

Useful definition time! An edited collection is a set of papers on a topic, each written by a different scholar and then assembled by an editor (or two or three). This differs from a monograph (=solo writing) by a single author (or two). If/when you cite a chapter from an edited collection, cite it by its author, not the editor. The editor didn’t write it (probably). Editors do often (also) have a chapter in their edited collection, but they didn’t write the whole thing. Example: Graham and I edited Macedon and Its Influences. Please don’t credit us for, say, Monica’s chapter. Monica would be (understandably) angry. Students commit this error ALL the time, even when I explain edited collections and do a jig to get their attention. TBH, I think they just don’t care. But I suspect they would if somebody attributed their hard work to someone else.

Let’s begin with finding things online (bear with me for this intro):

On the face of it, search engines are a miracle for researchers, especially those of us who recall the days when “search engine” = a card catalogue and book index…and indexes were expensive to produce before electronic document searches, so some books just didn’t have one. ARGH!

This is also where PDFs can be great, and perhaps why indexes are less used, as you can just run a document search for what you want.

Yet internet search engines, with their monetization and, now, AI summaries, have become increasingly useless. AI pulls material from a gajillion sites with little/no critical evaluation of quality…or even sometimes of the right topic. I’ve had students write about Philip II of Spain instead of Philip II of Macedon, because search engines confused them and the student didn’t bother to engage the All-Important Critical Reasoning Facility to verify who’s who.

My issues with AI are two-fold. First, environmentally, it’s an existential threat to us all. IMO, this should be the #1 concern. Full stop.

Yet it’s also a problem for human creativity. There are things AI can’t do, and THINK is one of them. It can compile and analyze data faster than I can blink, but after that, it’s stymied. It seems to me that—as usual—at least some humans have rushed to lionize a tool, claiming for it all sorts of things it manifestly cannot do. AI Tech Bros are just sophisticated snake-oil salesmen.

That said, AI does have important uses in history and archaeology: reconstructions of sites and broken images/texts, analysis of large sets of epigraphic evidence (such as curse tablets) to find patterns, linguistic reconstructions (see how AI can help “read” the charred Pompeii scrolls), etc. All of that is exactly what AI is well-suited for, so let’s not toss the baby with the bathwater. But you don’t need it to eat up water just to entertain you with a dancing dog in a tutu.

As for websites, always find out who wrote it. Most respectable educational websites will provide that information somewhere (check for a byline or in the footers for “who am I/are we?” links). If they don’t tell you, that’s a red flag. For larger “encyclopedic” websites, check who authored the entry. Just because somebody got an MA in history doesn’t mean they’re any sort of expert on Alexander beyond reading a couple bios or (maybe) taking a class. Do you want an article on Hephaistion written by Joe Blow… or by me (or Sabine), or at least by somebody who publishes on Alexander?

Anyway, forums with responses from humans (like reddit) have different issues, especially if you’re not a specialist able to evaluate the quality of what you’re being told. I’ve only used reddit once for plumeria information when generic “How to grow plumeria” websites failed me. On reddit, I got an answer to a very specific question about a very specific problem. But I already knew enough about plumeria to recognize whether the help was correct or likely bunk.

By contrast, scholarly books and papers already have that necessary gate-keeping. That’s what “refereed” means. The paper or book was sent to (at least 2) reviewers who are also specialists in the field. They return it with one of 3 responses: publish with minor revisions, revise and resubmit (more substantial revisions), or do not publish. It doesn’t see print until the issues are resolved. That means you can trust that the resulting piece is not complete cockamamie crap. (Usually. Verify that the publisher is academic.)

So how do you find these more reliable papers and books?

Google Scholar, JSTOR, & academia.edu

That’s the Holy Trinity of online (academic) search engines, although there are others too.

Google Scholar may be the place to begin. Don’t confuse this with plain ol’ Google, however.

The upside is that it collects anything and everything with even marginal academic bonafides, including PhD dissertations and MA theses. Also, it’ll pull book chapters and other things, including academic conference poster displays and Power-points (useful if you’re looking at archaeology or art history).

The downside is that same breadth. It does pull anything and everything without culling or curating. It’s up to YOU to check what that journal is, who publishes it, and do you trust it? Or run down who that author is, and can you trust them? These should always be questions in your head, btw, but they’re more necessary in some venues. And this is one of those venues.

Still, Google Scholar can create a nice list of articles for you to chase down. Because while some things you find that way may be free, many won’t be. SO, at this point, don’t pay for anything, just collect title, author, and journal/ publisher. There are several other venues for you to check before you buy it.

First stop….

JSTOR: a database of scholarly articles. It requires a subscription, or you can pay ala carte for the article you want. If you happen to be a student with a college/university library, your tuition is already paying for access, so use it. And if that library’s JSTOR doesn’t have the article, then ILL it.

What the hell is ILL? Interlibrary loan. It’s an agreement between libraries to share books and other material requested by a patron, either free or for a (usually minimal) fee. It’s basically a “wider world” library for you. Many people are wholly unaware it exists! Yes, it means an extra step, but most libraries—even public libraries—are part of the system. You just fill out a form (often online), to request the material, and provide the upper amount you’re willing to pay, typically for postage. These days, many things, especially articles, come electronically so that fee may well be nothing. That said, reference material and specialty texts may not be shared on ILL or have limited check-out/ special rules. Paolo Moreno’s Alexander the Great (ginormous art-history book) was originally “read onsite only.” As UNO faculty, I was allowed to take it for a 4-hour chunk to scan pieces of it back at the history department.*

Anyway, if you can’t get something via ILL, before you pay JSTOR, go to the journal website itself, which may well sell you a copy for notably less. For instance, you can get old papers from The Ancient History Bulletin for between $1-5. Check their archives. (And you’re directly supporting the journal!)

The chief pitfall of JSTOR (other than price/access) is that it provides journal articles, not book chapters, etc. In this era of a continually contracting number of journals, more and more of us publish in edited collections. I’ve had only 2 articles (of the last 8?) in a journal—both in Karanos, but because Karanos is open access, I doubt they even show up in JSTOR. (And if you’re into Macedonian history, bookmark Karanos!)

Which brings me to JSTOR’s second pitfall…

It runs on subscriptions. So even if you have access through your college or university (or other school), they buy a pre-curated list of journals. So your JSTOR may have The Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS) and TAPA (Transactions of the American Philological Association, but nobody calls it that because it’s a mouthful). Both are top tier, but your JSTOR may not have Arethusa or Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) or The Classical Journal (CJ) or The Classical World (CW), much less The Ancient World (AncW, which had a ton of articles on Macedonia in the late ‘80s and ‘90s by important scholars, but is from a little publisher). Dozens of Classical/ ancient history journals exist, but unless you’re a Chicago or Berkeley or Princeton or Oxford, you probably can’t get some. And libraries no longer carry physical copies for you to browse, if the journal even publishes paper copies anymore.

Academia.edu is an alternative (sorta) to finding articles on JSTOR, especially for those who aren’t students. This is a public (free) archive site where scholars (and others) post their work. So again, before you pay for anything, check academia.edu in case the author put it up there.

And scholars don’t just post articles, but also book-chapters and sometimes even abstracts and select content from books. (Rarely, however, will you find an entire book.)

There are, however, a few issues to be aware of.

Anyone can make an account and claim expertise in anything. The “gatekeeper” is YOU. So if you run random searches for papers about ___, and you don’t recognize the author as someone you’ve seen cited, check their bio to find out who they are. (Here’s mine, just so you can see what you’re looking for.) Then, to be safe, Google that person to verify. Most people don’t lie, and if they do and are caught, the site bars them… but it’s still on you to be sure you’re not reading some undergrad’s term paper. lol

Second, articles published before c. 2005 can only sometimes be found there. That’s around the time journals stopped sending offprints and began sending PDFs. An “offprint” is a paper copy of the article, just like later PDFs. We used to get anywhere from 10-30 to send to colleagues via snailmail. Back in the Dark Ages. 😉

Some older scholars (like me) have made PDFs of these (or acquired PDFs via JSTOR), which they’ve then uploaded to academia.edu. But that assumes a certain amount of internet literacy, and, of course, people who are now dead aren’t sharing their material, unless a family member or former student does it.

Second, most recent material likely isn’t there. Virtually all publishers have a contract clause forbidding the public posting of material for anywhere from 2-5 years. Some scholars ignore this (and publishers don’t usually police it), but most do honor it because academic publishers survive off library purchases and by the skin of their teeth. We don’t want them to go away, so we don’t undercut their measly royalties. And neither should you. So, patronize libraries folks. Libraries keep track of what gets requested. Everybody wins.

Also, because it’s an automated database, academia.edu sometimes adds multiple “copies” of the same paper to our profiles. I’ve had as many as 3 listings for the same damn article, two blank (because I didn’t upload them). We don’t have time to clear this shit out, if we remember at all. Ergo, the site is full of “ghost” papers: e.g., just the title, added by the site itself. But at least 1) you have the title (and publishing information) to request it via ILL. OR 2) you can message (or email) the author directly, to request it. Alas, not everyone with an account there checks it. And some profs are notorious for just not replying to email, regardless. So, you might never hear from them. But hey, it’s worth asking… including for anything recent that may not be uploaded yet. Privately, we can share those things for research purposes. (But don’t ask them for a whole book unless you know them personally. That’s far more of a faux pas.)

So…. those 3 databases/search engines should get you a fair way with online research.

Now, let me tell you the Joys of the Analog Research World

Libraries are a bloody gold mine. They allow you to do something online research doesn’t… find related material without trying to puzzle out how to enter it in a search engine. Or deal with the mountains of useless AI slop. You just plop yourself down in front of the relevant shelves and start looking at book titles. Oh, the joys of the Unexpected Discovery!

You (mostly) can’t do that online.

I’ve only rarely entered a library and walked out only with the books I went in to fetch. *grin*

In addition, for research, I prefer physical books. Yes, I realize PDFs make these available more widely (and often cheaper due to paper costs). Libraries are switching to them too, which creates all sorts of issues. You can be in a university library, but disallowed to access online books not held (physically) by the library. It has to do with subscription costs. I discovered this at PSU. Despite being an alumnus and sitting in the actual library in State College on a research trip, I could use only books from their stacks. So when I got home, I had to turn around and ILL 6 of the books I needed that Penn State had access to…but not access for me, non-student/non-faculty. This is going to turn academic research into a nightmare, going forward.

Anyway, PDF books don’t work for me because I don’t just read them, I mark (and sticky-tab) the holy hell out of them. 😊

I also find it much easier to flip back and forth in a physical book, looking for or comparing something. Even with articles and book chapters, I print them out. Yes, yes, “a waste of paper,” except I’m not wasting it. I’m using it. The one advantage of PDFs (at least for my research style) is that, when it comes to edited collections (especially if I need only 1-2 chapters), I can yank those via PDF, then print them without hauling home an entire book. This is also why I really dislike “combined bibliographies” in edited collections. Even if it means a lot of repeated books in each separate bibliography, I want the bibliography for that paper, not all the papers. Especially if I’m printing out that chapter only.

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Here’s the thing: online searches yield a different sort of results from analog ones. So, it really behooves you to do BOTH. That’s why I’m a bit sad to see the analog research angle falling out of favor.

I think that’s quite enough on research. Happy reading!!!

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* Lending libraries make the ILL rules, not your own institution. The Moreno book is expensive and hard to find in the US (why I had to ILL it), but I’ve been allowed to take home books that cost twice as much. Some libraries are just stricter.