Using JSTOR

Basic Searching

The Basic Search form appears on the main page of www.jstor.org and also at the top of most content pages on the site. You can type any search terms into the Basic Search box and JSTOR will search for those terms across all of the content licensed or purchased by the library.

Here are a few things you can do to easily improve your search results:

• Place words within quotation marks to search for exact phrases (“to be or not to be”).

• Use Boolean operators to search for alternate terms (microcredit OR microfinance).

• Use ti: to search for the title of an article or book (ti:"body ritual among the nacirema")

While we call the simple search form a "Basic Search," you can perform fairly complex queries with it using special codes and Boolean operators. These options are explained in more detail below.

Searching for an Exact Phrase

If you want to include more than one term in a field search, use parentheses () to enclose your search terms, or quotation marks (" ") to search for an exact phrase. The example above ("american revolution") searches for the exact phrase "american revolution" rather than treating it as a keyword search (american AND revolution).

Some other examples:

• ti:cat dog will find the word cat in the item title field and the word dog in any field  

• ti:(cat dog) will find the words cat and dog in the item title field in any order 

• ti:"color purple" will find the exact phrase color purple in the item title field

• ti:(peacekeeping AND "united nations") will find the word peacekeeping and the phrase united nations in the item title field

Word stems

Add and * to the end of a word stem to include different version of the word. Example biolog* will find biology and biological

Advanced Searching

Limiting a Search to a Specific Field

Use the drop-down boxes to limit search terms to the title, author, abstract, or caption text. Important to know:

• If you limit your search to the abstract field, you will search only a subset of the journal content on JSTOR. JSTOR doesn't create abstracts for content that was published without them; abstracts exist for only about 10% of the articles.  Abstracts tend to be more common in certain disciplines (social sciences, sciences) and in more recently published content.

• Captions are searchable for much, but not all of the image content on JSTOR. Some images do not contain captions.

Combining Search Terms

Use  Boolean operators, AND/OR/NOT and NEAR 5/10/25. The NEAR operator looks for the combinations of keywords within 5, 10, or 25 words places of each other. Important to know: ​​the NEAR operator only works when searching for single keyword combinations. For example, you may search for cat NEAR 5 dog, but not "domesticated cat" NEAR 5 dog.

Narrowing a Search

Use the “Narrow by” options to search only articles, include/exclude book reviews, search for content published during a particular time frame, or in a particular language.

Limit an Article Search to a Specific Discipline(s)

You can focus an article search in specific disciplines and titles using the checkboxes in the discipline list under the "Journal Filter" section. Important to know: discipline searching is currently only available for searching journal content. Selecting this option will exclude ebooks from the search.

Search Results

The format and display of search results is the same for Basic and Advanced searches.

• Use "Academic Content" option to filter results by journal articles or ebook chapters.

• Use "Primary Source Content" option to filter results by the type of primary source.

• Use the "Publication Date" menu to limit results to a certain publication time period.

• Use the "Subject" menu to limit results to journals related to specific subjects.

• Use the "Access Type" menu to limit your results by type of access.

• Use the "Sort by" menu to view search results by relevance, oldest items, or newest items. 

• Use the "Export Selected" menu to choose the export format

​Search Relevance

Relevance on JSTOR is a combination of many things. Key elements include:

• More unique terms in the text result in higher scores when searches contain those terms. For example, the keyword “epistemology" gets a greater boost than “university” because it is less common.

• Phrase matches are boosted higher than just keyword matches. A search for "the quick brown fox" will assign higher relevance to a document containing the exact words "the quick brown fox" than a document containing "the brown fox is quick."

• More recent content is given a slight boost.

Getting Geeky with JSTOR

PROXIMITY SEARCHING - JSTOR search allows you to find terms that are within a set number of words of each other using the tilde (~) symbol. In this example ("debt forgiveness"~10), you will only get results with the terms debt and forgiveness within ten words of each other. You can replace "10" with a different number of words.

Boosting Term Relevance - You may increase the importance of any term in your search by using the caret (^) symbol followed by a number that represents the rise in relevance. In the example above (cat^7 dog), an occurrence of the word cat in an item is seven times more important than the word dog.

You can create citations in the following styles directly from sources on JSTOR:

MLA (version 8), APA (version 6), and Chicago (version 16)

How to create citations with one click:

If you just want to cite one item, you can do so with one click:

Either next to your search result or on the article itself, you will see a "Cite this item" button.

Click that, then a window will appear

Copy and paste the citation of your choice.

Make sure you double-check the formatting before submitting a paper with one of these citations! Computers are great, but they're not perfect.

How to export citations as an RIS file or text file

If find several citations you want to save for later, you can export them to a .txt or RIS file to upload into the citation management software of your choice:

From the search results, select the check boxes to the left of the search results you want to export. If you just want to cite one article, click on that article and proceed to Step 2.

Chose "Export Selected Citations' in the upper right hand corner of the page.

From there you'll find a drop down menu with file options. Chose the file that suits your needs..