JSTOR search

My first search for web design resources used the JSTOR database. Since I have not gathered any information on the topic yet and because JSTOR is a database that covers a wide range of academic disciplines I started with a broach natural language search for "web design" to get an idea of what was out there.
This is what my results looked like:


As you can see, not only are there an unwieldy number of results, but two of the three top hits are about...spiders. I probably should have anticipated this homonym problem.

Accordingly, I went back to the Advanced Search screen and re-ran the same natural language search, this time using the "narrow by discipline" function. This is a pre-search limiter that allows you to limit your JSTOR search to a subset of JSTOR journals, either by selecting individual journal titles or by selecting disciplines, academic field categories into which JSTOR has sorted all its journals.

My new search then showed in JSTOR as:
(web design) AND disc:(anthropology-discipline OR business-discipline OR historyofscience-discipline OR libraryscience-discipline OR markadvert-discipline OR psychology-discipline OR sociology-discipline)

This search produced about 11,000 results and, as the screenshot below demonstrates, the top hits are much more relevant than in the previous search.






11,000 results is still obviously too many. I now have to start making choices about exactly what information I want. I am all for adding limiters rather than changing the language of the search when you can, because the behavior of limiters is (or at least should be) completely predictable whereas in most cases you can never be sure how changing the language of your search will affect the results. So I again modified my search to add the limiters of English language, publication date of 2004-2014 (inclusive), and document types of article, book, or miscellaneous (excluding pamphlets and reviews). This new search is expressed in JSTOR as:
(web design) AND ((cty:(journal) AND ty:(fla OR edi OR nws OR mis)) OR cty:(book)) AND (year:[2004 TO 2014]) AND la:(eng) AND disc:(anthropology-discipline OR business-discipline OR historyofscience-discipline OR libraryscience-discipline OR markadvert-discipline OR psychology-discipline OR sociology-discipline)

It cut the results list to 5,888. I read the first 25 results and found that about 1/3-1/2 were relevant. This was satisfactory so results will follow in the next post.