FYS 120K: Life with AI

JSTOR is one of the many databases accessible to you via the St. Olaf College Library. It contains millions of scholarly resources, including full-text journal articles and books, as well as images and other primary materials (e.g., letters, government documents, and oral histories). You can find sources for over 75 disciplines in JSTOR, including humanities and social sciences.

Earlier this year (2025), JSTOR released a new AI Research Tool which can help you at various stages in the research process, especially in evaluating resources for relevance. Please keep in mind that this tool is meant to enhance your research, but it doesn’t replace your own work in that process. You still need to know enough about your subject area to select an initial topic and keywords when you begin your search.

Once you’ve entered your initial search terms and selected a first article for consideration, you can activate the AI Research Tool on the article page. Note that you must first create a free JSTOR account in order to activate that AI Research Tool. 

1. Navigate to the St. Olaf supported version of JSTOR: https://ezproxy.stolaf.edu/login?url=http://www.jstor.org/ 
2. In the top right corner, select the “Log In” option and then “Log In with Google” to access JSTOR via your St. Olaf Google account. You will see “Access provided by the St. Olaf College Libraries” at the top of the page.
3. Once you are logged into your JSTOR account, enter your search terms as you normally would, then select a relevant result. 
4. If it isn’t already activated, you can turn the AI Research Tool on using the “on/off” toggle button in the top right of the search result window.

Once the AI Research Tool has been activated within the search result window, you are ready to begin using the tool. Before you engage with the tool, it will automatically provide you with an explanation for how your search terms are related to the text along with citations identifying the corresponding pages of the text. To engage further with the tool, there are four main options:

• What is this text about? Will summarize the key points and arguments in the text, similar to an abstract. This can help you evaluate the article to determine whether/how it may be relevant to your research topic.
• Recommended topics: Will suggest key concepts that are relevant to the text. This can help you refine your research topic and provide new ideas about related topics and search terms. Click on any of the suggested topics to start a new JSTOR search in a new browser tab.
• Show me related content: Will show you items in JSTOR that contain textual similarities. These are different from the “related text suggestions” that show up on the sidebar of the item page, which is based on the usage patterns of other JSTOR users, instead of textual similarities. Note that both can be helpful in identifying additional articles within JSTOR that you might want to use in your research project.
• Ask a question about this text: Will answer questions you have about the specific text. For example, you can ask whether the article mentions another idea or author that may be connected to your research topic. After the answer to your question, you will find number(s) which provide citation information so that you can see where in the article the cited information can be found. Note that it is limited because it will only answer the question by using the information contained within that specific document; it does not pull additional information from other items in JSTOR or other websites.

PROS

• It can help you evaluate documents for relevance to your research topic more quickly by providing summaries of key points and arguments.
• It can help you refine your research topic by providing recommendations for keywords related to the context of a document.
• It can help you identify related resources by suggesting additional materials within JSTOR that have textual similarities.
• It allows you to engage in a “conversation” with the document by asking questions in natural language.
• It provides citations for the text being analyzed so that you can easily locate those ideas within the text for closer evaluation.
• It stores your user data separately from the AI Research Tool and does not share user data for purposes of training third-party LLMs (https://about.jstor.org/research-tool/#legal)

CONS

• It will ONLY provide information about the article you are viewing in JSTOR
• It will NOT search for information from outside sources or the internet; if the answer to your question isn’t contained within the article text itself, it cannot provide an answer.
• The information provided within the tool will TIMEOUT after three hours, so you should take notes or download the chat content to save for later reference.