Know What Each Database Is For (And Is Not For)

JSTOR: The scholarly journal archive

  • What it is: a digital library of more than 2,000 academic journals (plus books and primary sources), strong in humanities, social sciences, and some sciences. JSTOR is an archive: its typical journal coverage starts at the first issue and ends at a "moving wall" of roughly 3–5 years behind the present — recent issues are often not on JSTOR. JSTOR overview from a university library
  • What it is not: a news archive, a legal database, or a full-text search engine for brand-new articles. Problem with JSTOR not finding your topic? Check whether your topic belongs in a different database, or search a general database (like scholarly Google or your library's discovery layer) for recent articles, then use JSTOR for the deep archive.

LexisNexis (Lexis+): The legal and news powerhouse

  • What it is: through your university's subscription, LexisNexis Academic / Lexis+ gives you federal and state case law, statutes and regulations, law reviews, and a massive news archive (tens of thousands of news sources, many going back decades), plus company and financial information.
  • What it is not: a general scholarly journal archive with JSTOR's coverage, and its learning curve is steeper — its interface assumes you know legal citation structure. For political science, criminal justice, journalism, business law, and pre-law coursework, it is indispensable.

The strategic rule: JSTOR for scholarly arguments, LexisNexis for law, news evidence, and primary legal materials. A paper on media framing of court rulings needs both halves.

JSTOR, Mastered

Advanced search that finds the right article fast

Basic search ("civil war memory") returns thousands of hits. Advanced search retrieves the right ones:

  • Field searches: restrict keywords to title, author, abstract, or caption text using the dropdowns. Searching "civil war memory" in title yields a focused list; the same words in full text drown you.
  • Boolean operators: quoted phrases for exact wording ("memory politics"), AND/OR/NOT for combinations. JSTOR syntax: use OR in capitals for alternatives, use NOT to exclude ("memory politics" NOT Holocaust).
  • Narrow by discipline: check the discipline boxes (History, Political Science, Sociology…) before searching — the single highest-impact filter for humanities topics.
  • Narrow by type: article vs. book review vs. primary source. Filtering out book reviews alone transforms search usability for research papers. JSTOR advanced search guidance

The citation-chasing technique (the master move)

Found one perfect article? Use it as a treasure map. Two directions:

  1. Backward chasing: read its footnotes/bibliography — every citation is a scholarly breadcrumb that has already been vetted; pull the most-cited 5–8 sources.
  2. Forward chasing: JSTOR's "Cited By" feature shows newer articles that cite your article — i.e., the conversation that continued after it. Also, browsable subject headings on each article page connect you to the thematic cluster.

Master students build entire paper bibliographies from one foundational article plus its citing literature — in about 20 minutes.

Saving, citing, and the export trick

  • Register a free JSTOR account to save articles to your personal workspace and create folders per course/paper.
  • JSTOR's citation tool generates formatted citations (MLA/APA/Chicago) — always verify the generated citation (they are not error-free), but they save you the typing.
  • The export to Zotero/EndNote/RefWorks options transfer metadata directly into your reference manager — learn the reference manager, and your bibliography assembles itself.

When JSTOR says no

The moving wall means the newest research is elsewhere. Systematic workflow: search your library's discovery layer + scholarly Google for the last 5 years, then drop into JSTOR for the deep history of the debate. Both halves are required for a serious literature review.

LexisNexis, Mastered

Getting oriented: the three main silos

Lexis+ organizes content into: Cases (case law), Statutes & Regulations, and Secondary Materials + News. Choose your silo before searching — a keyword search across everything returns a confusing mix. For student research:

  • Pre-law / courts / criminal justice: search Cases, filtering by jurisdiction (e.g., "Supreme Court of the United States" or a specific state).
  • Policy and news analysis: search News, using date ranges and specific sources (The New York Times archive on LexisNexis reaches back to 1980 for many titles).
  • Law reviews: search Secondary Materials — law review articles are among the most rigorous secondary sources available and count as excellent academic citations.

The power of Boolean on Lexis

Lexis's search engine is Boolean at heart, and nested terms with connectors change everything:

  • Terms & Connectors: "affordable care act" AND medicare /p expansion — the /p connector means "within the same paragraph," /s means "same sentence," and /n means within n words. This is the difference between finding the discussion you need and wading through everything.
  • Wildcards: ! for a string (e.g., neglig! matches negligence, negligent, negligently), * for a single character.
  • Restrict somewhere crucial: date ranges (date(geq 2020)) and jurisdictions are the two filters that save the most time.

Shepardizing: the professional validity check

The single most impressive skill you can bring to a legal research assignment: Shepard's Citations (the flag next to each case). It tells you whether a case is still good law:

  • Green flag: the case is still valid and can be relied on.
  • Yellow/red flag: the case has been questioned, distinguished, or overruled — citing it without checking for history is a classic beginner error (and in legal writing, an embarrassing one).
  • Use the "Shepardize" function on any case you plan to rely on, and note the treatment in parentheses: (citing Plaintiff v. Defendant) — professors and legal supervisors expect to see this diligence.

The citator trap and the news gem

Beyond cases: Shepardize statutes too (a statute may have been amended or held unconstitutional). And do not overlook the news archive: for journalism, history, and political science papers, LexisNexis's news database is often the only place to find full-text coverage of a specific date, event, or local newspaper — the "as it happened" primary source that turns a paper from recycled into original.

A Master Workflow Combining Both

For a research paper spanning scholarship and law/news, run this pipeline:

Phase 1 — Scope (JSTOR): Advanced search → title field keywords → discipline filter → read 5 abstracts → identify the foundational article. Phase 2 — Map (JSTOR): backward + forward citation chasing → build a 15-source bibliography of scholarly debate. Phase 3 — Law (Lexis): identify the relevant statute/case via Terms & Connectors search → Shepardize → pull the controlling case + 2–3 citing cases. Phase 4 — Evidence (Lexis News): date-limited news search on the event or public reaction → capture 3–5 dated reports. Phase 5 — Synthesize: the scholarly debate (JSTOR) + the legal framework (Lexis) + the contemporaneous record (Lexis News) now triangulate your argument. A paper built this way has depth of evidence — which is what separates an A from a B.

The Five Mistakes That Keep Students Stuck

  1. Using basic search only. The dropdowns, discipline filters, and date ranges are the database's real power. Learn them once, use them forever.
  2. Ignoring the moving wall. Citing only JSTOR sources on a topic that changed in 2023 reads as out-of-touch. Pair the archive with recent literature.
  3. Never Shepardizing. For any legal citation, one flag check protects your entire argument's foundation.
  4. Searching everything at once on Lexis. Choose your silo (Cases vs. News vs. Secondary) first; mixed results are unusable.
  5. Collecting sources without a system. Cut-and-paste chaos loses citations. Save into folders (JSTOR) and Shepardized notes (Lexis) as you go — the bibliography builds itself.

Conclusion

JSTOR and LexisNexis are not search bars; they are structured research environments with rules of engagement. On JSTOR, master advanced field searches, discipline filters, and the citation-chasing technique — and always pair the archive with recent literature. On Lexis, choose your silo first, wield wildcards and proximity connectors, Shepardize everything you rely on, and mine the news archives for primary evidence. Run the five-phase pipeline — scope, map, law, evidence, synthesize — and your research deepens from recycled summaries into a triangulated argument that professors can tell wasn't built from a Web search. The databases were always there. The mastery was the missing piece.

Your next step: Open JSTOR right now and run one advanced search in your current research area with three filters: title field, one discipline, article-type only. Then open Lexis, run the same topic with the /p connector in the News silo, and note how different the result sets feel. That contrast — scholarship vs. record — is the beginning of real research.