Find New Inspiration for Your Semi-Finished Product With This Tool
Have you ever felt stuck when something is half written? Maybe it’s a school newspaper, or a story, or … an article about life hacks. A tool called JSTOR Analyzer can read your draft and suggest something new to you, making it a brilliant way to procrastinate.
According to the JSTOR staff , their parser will read your text, figure out what it’s about, and show you the best research articles and book chapters you probably should have read. I have found that his algorithms are accurate and precise, but they are very useful in finding new rabbit holes to explore.
First, I pasted in the text of the probiotic article I wrote yesterday . JSTOR selected probiotics and vitamins as keywords, and Lactobacillus , which I have not named, but which is a genus of bacteria commonly available in probiotic supplements. So far, so good! But his recommendations were not recent probiotic research. Instead, they were mostly historical articles on bacteria and vitamins, including this one, which expressed excitement about the newfangled concept of “vitamins.”
So I tried another document that had science fiction stories that I was writing in my spare time. They mostly focus on self-aware robots and how humans relate to them. JSTOR selected keywords: voicemail, rock music, blogs, budgerigars, kitchen tables . (I never mentioned budgies or other birds, but I used the word “tweet” in the sense of twitter.)
Luckily, you can edit the keywords, so I deleted the budgerigars and added the robots . Soon I was looking through ethical article about what it means to be self-contained, and a set of additional tags that have meaning: I could click on Alexa, information technology, and much more.
JSTOR includes not only scientific articles, but sometimes poetry. When I pasted in this article on first aid for parties , the keywords were roughly correct: first aid, first aid, and libation were the top three. But the resulting documents included a poem by Ezra Pound called Psychological Hour and a 1916 meditation on the nature of Boston , which the author notes can be both drunk and sober.
Therefore, I do not recommend JSTOR Analyzer as the perfect way to find one paper reference is missing, but I do recommend it as a source of interesting tangents that can possibly shake up the way you think about your topic. And often this is exactly what you need when you get stuck.