Karnas - Revolutions Project: JSTOR

JSTOR supports full-text keyword searching across all of the content on www.jstor.org. JSTOR generally includes all the content from articles, books, and pamphlets, cover to cover. This makes it possible to search front matter and back matter, letters to the editor, advertisements, and other types of material along with scholarly articles and book chapters. The default setting for search results is to show matches for only content licensed or purchased by the library, but a researcher may choose to change this setting for their own session.

There are two search forms on JSTOR.org, a Basic Search (on the main page at www.jstor.org and at the top of most pages) and an Advanced Search (www.jstor.org/action/showAdvancedSearch). This guide will cover each of these forms, as well as how to understand search results. 

Quick Tips:

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.

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 the drop-down boxes to combine search terms using the 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 "Content Type" menu to filter results by journal articles, ebook chapters, and pamphlets.
Use the "Subject" menu to limit results to journals related to specific subjects.
Use the "Publication Date" menu to limit results to a certain publication time period.
Use the "Access Level" menu to limit your results by tupe 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.