Im Blog der Castilleja School Library fasst Kiana B. unter dem Titel «Why I Love JSTOR» zusammen, weshalb sie die wissenschaftliche Datenbank JSTOR liebt:
«Reading scholarly articles instructs us about writing as well. What does the author do to illustrate complex ideas that I find digestible and relevant? What pieces of information are essential and play a key role in their analytical argument? What are the different ways they explore and address their thesis? Papers can go in various directions; they can follow rules, break them, they can be organized or all over the place, and each option has its pros and cons. Watch out, English teachers, you may be getting an essay that disregards the five-paragraph format sometime soon.
It’s also amazing just how much information is on this five-letter database. So many intellectual pathways to take when discussing just one line of Shakespeare! People have so many ideas about the importance of monsters and ghosts! There is so much historical context to Kanye West’s lyrical choices! JSTOR reminds me that so much out there is fascinating, that there are worlds behind even a small two-word phrase I’ve underlined in a book.
So whether you are doing research for a class or fulfilling your brain’s desire to learn and read, JSTOR is a great database to use. It isn’t brilliant because it is full of genius authors (although it has some of those too), but it is brilliant because of you. You are magical because you care about the contents of the articles you are reading and you want to learn, and because you can articulate the takeaways (whatever you happened to take away; there is no right and wrong way of reading) in an accessible and important way. Let’s transform scholarship to be whatever we want it to be; to help us with research papers, to make us laugh, to inspire us, or anything else.»