JSTOR is a great multi-disciplinary database, however, its name stands for Journal Storage, and thus it is not the best place for the most up-to-date current scholarship.
Tips for Jstor
Jstor is an excellent full text archive of humanities, social science and business journals and includes a large number of history journals.
This is not an exhaustive collection, and it will not contain things published within the last 4 years. For citations for the most current history articles, useAmerica: History and Life and Historical Abstracts.
Remember, JSTOR searches the full text of the article, meaning you should choose your keywords carefully to avoid getting irrelevant articles. A plus side of this is JSTOR is good for searching for more obscure references to a topic.
To narrow your searches further, select specific disciplines from the limiting list.
To further control your search, use special search characters to increase the presence of certain important terms:
^# after a word will request that that particular word be present a minimum of # number of times in the article (ex. irish^10 AND soldier^10)
~# after two words in quotes will ask that those word be within # words of each other. (ex. "women* suffrage"~5)
JSTOR does not in include articles from the last 2-3 years of most of its journals, so for the most recent and up to date scholarship, search Historical Abstracts or America: History and Life.
