AnthroSource — Guide
AnthroSource is an online database of full-text journals, past and present, published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The database includes a faceted search engine.
You can access the Anthrosource home page from the Libraries Portal Page or from the AnthroSource entry in WATSONLINE, or you can type http://www.anthrosource.net directly into the navigation toolbar. To use AnthroSource from a remote computer, however, you will have to access it through Watsonline via the proxy server. You don’t need to “sign in” or “register”: You’ll know you’re ‘in’ by the fact that “Metropolitan Museum of Art” appears at the top of every page.
We’re going to concentrate on two features: “Browse Journals” and the Searching box. In addition to these features, the home page outlines a number of advanced features that are available exclusively for AAA members.
Clicking Browse Journals will take you to the List of Journals page. Click View AnthroSource holdings and you will get a rundown of all the issues listed by title. (You can get to the same page by clicking the View holdings information link on the home page.) Not all issues of every title are available on AnthroSource: Some issues are missing and others have not yet been digitized. Take Anthropology news for example: Recent issues are not available on AnthroSource, and the back issues are available only from 1979 and earlier.
Click a specific title such as American ethnologist, either on the AnthroSource Holdings page or on the List of Journals page, and you will get a list of issues and an indication of their availability in full text. If you know what title and issue you want you can go directly to that issue. For example, click on the text below Latest Issue and you get a display of that issue’s contents. Scrolling down you notice it includes feature articles, review essays and book reviews. For some journals it also includes news and announcements, obituaries and correspondence; there’s even a picture of the cover.
Remember, if you know what AAA journal you’re looking for, you don’t have to go through AnthroSource to get the full text. You can also get to it by searching for the “Online” or “[electronic resource]” version of that title in WATSONLINE. There you will also discover the extent of the Museum’s electronic holdings, including those coming from AnthroSource. Clicking on the hypertext link brings you back to the AnthroSource page for that journal.
Let’s look at a specific article. From a recent issue of American ethnologist [v. 34, no. 4] let’s look at Sally Price’s article entitled “Into the Mainstream.” Clicking on that link gives you the citation, an abstract, some hypertext keywords and an image of the first page. You might also notice that this article was posted online on October 9, 2007, for the November 2007 issue. It’s common for articles to be posted online before the print copy arrives in the library.
To get the entire article, click on “Full-Text PDF”. The article opens in Adobe Acrobat. All the usual Acrobat features will apply, including searching and resizing, as well as output functions such as saving and printing. Emailing the entire article from Acrobat is not recommended. To send a linked citation of the article to yourself or to others, click “Email a friend” at the bottom of the abstract page.
If you go back to the holdings display for American ethnologist and click open the entries for earlier decades, you will notice that the earlier issues are in fact made available through JSTOR. You get to the same version going through AnthroSource as you do going through JSTOR. And both AnthroSource and JSTOR are available throughout the museum and remotely through the WATSONLINE proxy server. The newest issues, those on this side of JSTOR’s seven-year ‘moving wall’, are still available only through AnthroSource.
Searching, sorting & filtering
Let’s say you want to search across several journals or the entire set of titles available in AnthroSource. Using the “AnthroSearch” search box on the home page is the quickest, if not the most precise way to find what you’re looking for. AnthroSource will search across similar words, such as “anthropology” and “anthropologist”, as well as plurals, of course. You can also narrow a search by enclosing a phrase or phrases in quotation marks.
As an example let’s say you remember an article somewhere having something to do with the concept of artists’ copyright in Vanuatu. Searching these terms in the “AnthroSearch” box yields 38 results [at this writing]. By default any search you do will be returned in order of relevancy. You will notice that the article by Haidy Geismar in American ethnologist rises to the top of this search results based on relevancy. A look at the article shows the keywords from your search appear as highlighted text in the title, keywords and the abstract.
You can re-sort the search results by date (which in AnthroSource means most recent first), or narrow your search by the using the suggested ‘focus concepts’ on the right-hand side of the page: by topics, by journal title, or by author. Not all the articles retrieved will be represented by topical focus concepts, especially earlier ones.
Some words of caution. Keyword search results could come not only from the title or the abstract, but also from the body of the article or even from the bibliography. Older articles may not have as many searching points, such as keywords or even abstracts. And if the search terms are found within the article itself, AnthroSource won’t show you where those keywords actually appear.
The Advanced Search page allows you to refine keyword and phrase searches, as well as to limit by author, journal title, or publication date or date range. Take for example a broad literature search: everything written by Franz Boas, for example. A simple search of “Franz Boas” will get you not only works written by Boas but also about him, as well as articles citing him in the bibliography. The Advanced Search by author feature in AnthroSource allows you to search only by the author’s last name.
If you want to limit your search by specific journal titles, here are your options:
To search in a single journal title, go the the List of Available Issues page for that journal and select “This Journal” from the drop-down menu below the search box.
Alternatively (and with fewer key strokes) you can do the same thing in Advanced Search by selecting the title you want from the drop-down menu in “Publication”.
If you want to search more than one journal at the same time but not the entire collection, you must do a search first, then use the “focus results to articles published in” feature and look at the results for each title you want to limit by.
Published 4/16/08
