DATABASE ACTIVITY

            The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with the periodical databases available on-line through the TSU library. TSU’s library has many full-text databases of peer-reviewed articles, but JSTOR is one of the best for historical research at the undergraduate level. If you have problems accessing any of these databases, contact the instructor or the library. Address all numbered parts of the assignment in order.

            1. Identify a topic and at least two key words or phrases. (For example, if you topic were gender roles in imperial Rome, your key words would be "empire" and “Rome” and "gender" and maybe also "women.") For this assignment you can try out the topic that you'd like to do for your research paper, or you can explore another topic. If you can't think of a topic, try one of the following topics: legal status of Roman women, military strategy of Julius Caesar, ethnic make-up of Alexander the Great’s army, housing in early Egypt, ecological stresses in Mesopotamia, monks as “soldiers of Christ,” relationship between Athens and Sparta.  . 

            2. List the three most promising articles (NOT book reviews) from a key-word search in JSTOR. Format them as you would in a bibliography (JSTOR gives the necessary information but not quite the way that you would want to list a source in a research paper). Note that you should avoid very old articles (before about 1950 or so). If you use the "Advanced Search" feature, you can define your terms more exactly, check off just "articles" so as to avoid book reviews, and choose publication dates (I usually do so by year, with the current year as the ending date).

            3. Identify one other database available at TSU’s library and run a key-word search on the same topic, then list the three most promising articles (different from the JSTOR results), again formatted as you would in a bibliography. (Some good databases to look for are Ebsco Host, Wilson Omnifile, and Project Muse, but any database with full-text periodicals would be appropriate.)

            4. Using JSTOR, find two reviews of a biography of Cleopatra and give full citations for each. The Advanced Search will help as you can select only reviews, thus excluding articles.

            5. Write a short paragraph describing your search process and its results. Points to include would be how you selected your search terms, whether you had to change search terms, how JSTOR compared to other library databases, and how the articles you retrieved differed from what you might have found in other sources such as books or open internet pages (consider endnotes/footnotes, technical language, length, narrowness of topic, type of argument made, and other distinguishing characteristics).