Basic Searching in Project MUSE

Описание: Learn how to do basic searching in Project MUSE, browse results using filters, and save results.

Advanced Searching in Project MUSE:    • Advanced Searching in Project Muse  
Using MyMUSE Library:    • Using MyMUSE Library in Project MUSE  
UA Libraries Database Portal: http://guides.lib.ua.edu/az.php

Video Transcript:

Hi, my name is Sarah. I’m a librarian at the University of Alabama. This video will demonstrate how to use Project MUSE to find scholarly books and articles for your research.

Starting at the libraries homepage (libraries.ua.edu), select the “Databases” link from the quick menu. You can choose “Project MUSE” from the Frequently Used list at the right, or locate it under “P” in the A-Z list.

Project MUSE provides full text access to scholarly journals and ebooks in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary fields such as gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, area and ethnic studies, and religious studies.

When you reach Project MUSE from UA Libraries, it takes you to a page where you can either browse using the filters along the left side of the page, or perform a simple keyword search using the box at the top.


For example, let’s say you’re doing research on environmentalism. You can start here with a broad search for “environmentalism” in the top search box. You can also click on the yellow magnifying glass to take you to the advanced search page, which we’ll look at in the advanced searching video.


This search returned a few different types of items: journal articles, a special issue of a journal, and reviews. Project MUSE also has ebooks. The type of a source is listed in red in each record.

For right now, let’s focus on articles. Under “content type” on the left, you should check the box next to “articles.”

This is still a pretty broad topic with a lot of results, so let’s look at some ways to narrow them down.

Say you really want to focus on environmentalism and religion. You can narrow your results in 2 ways.

First, you can use filters, or facets, to browse within your results.

On the left side of the page, there are filters for publisher, book series, journal, author, language, and research area, and you can limit by publication year.

For most users, the research area filter will be most useful.

You can either scroll through the box or type a keyword in the field at the top. Select the subject you want to limit your results to.

Now, I have a list of about 60 results that mention “environmentalism” somewhere in their content and are tagged with the research area “religion.”

This method can be a great way to explore a new topic with a single, broad search term. You can select different research area limiters, or just scroll through the list to see which research areas are represented.

Let’s try a different approach. Scroll back to the top of the page and select “clear all facets” above the search boxes.

This deselects any limiters you have applied in the boxes below, while keeping your original search term.

Select “articles” again, and type “religion” in the second search box.

By default, you’re searching “content,” which includes titles, abstracts, and full text, and the “and” connector is set.

This search will return results for anything that has both of these terms anywhere in its content.

You’ll notice that this method returns more results than the first one we tried.

Once you find an article that will be good for your research, you have a few options to save it.

You can download the item directly from the list of search results, or select the article title to navigate to the item page.

From there, you can email it to yourself by entering your email in the “recommend” field on the right. The email will include the article information, abstract, and a link.

You can also generate a citation by selecting “view citation” near the top of the page.

Choose the format you want, and copy and paste it into your document.

Make sure you double check that all the information and formatting is correct.

That’s it for now. Thanks for watching, and for more information on searching in Project MUSE, check out our videos “Advanced Searching in Project MUSE” and “Using the MyMuse Library” on our YouTube page.

That's all for now, thanks for watching. If you have any questions, you can call us at 205-348-6047, text us at 205-377-0920, or visit ask.lib.ua.edu to ask a librarian.