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The JSTOR archive contains the full runs of scholarly journals, beginning with the very first issue of each title. There is often a gap, typically from one to five years, between a journal's most recently published issue and the content available through JSTOR (learn more about this at The Moving Wall).
When searching, your search terms are compared with every word in the body of the articles as well as the citation information (e.g., author, title). You may formulate more narrowly-defined searches where only the author, title, abstract, or caption field is searched (roughly 10% of articles in the JSTOR collection include abstracts). You may also narrow your search by discipline from the Advanced Search page.
In addition to the full text of the issues available in the JSTOR archive, you may also search and browse the metadata (title, author, and abstract) of more recent content of select titles. For these search results, links to the full text articles available at other online resources will be provided. In order for you to access the full text of the linked articles, you must have a subscription to the other resource, either through your library or individually.
To search for an exact phrase, insert double quote marks (") before and after the phrase. For example:
You can narrow your search query to the title, author, journal names, or other citation information through the use of field operators.
Each item in JSTOR has information associated with it, categorized in a variety of "fields." For example, the title of an article is in a title field and the author in an author field. Each field can be represented in a search query by its abbreviation.
For example, the query au:smith finds all items for which Smith is listed as an author.
Use these symbols to search for terms in:
NOTE: Field abbreviations only apply to the term immediately following them.
If you want to include more than one term in a specific field search, use
parentheses to enclose your search terms or quotation marks to search for
an exact phrase.
For example:
You may combine search terms and fields using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.
AND
When you combine search terms with AND in a full-text search,
you find all items (articles, titles, reviews, etc.) in which both terms
appear. When you combine search terms, your search results will be more precise,
as with ti:cat AND au:tirole.
You can explicitly denote a Boolean AND in the following ways:
OR
Using OR between search terms allows to you find all items
which contain either term. To search for items containing one or more of
your search terms, use OR. For example:
NOT
Searches using NOT will only find items that do not contain
the search term following NOT. To exclude items containing
a particular search term, use NOT before the term.
To find all items with the word cat that do not contain the word dog, search for:
NOTE: Be sure to include a space before the dash, but not after.
Parentheses allow you to determine the order in which terms will be combined. Thus the query: "currency reform" AND (russia OR "soviet union") will search for items that contain the phrase "currency reform" and that contain either russia or "soviet union".
Why Use Grouping?
Without grouping parentheses, the query "currency reform" AND (russia OR "soviet union") will be interpreted as "currency reform" AND russia OR "soviet union", which returns items containing either both of "currency reform" and russia or containing "soviet union". By using parentheses, you can carefully control the grouping of search terms.
Additional Examples:
(finch OR sparrow) AND exotic will search for items that
contain the word exotic and either the word finch or
the word sparrow.
(birds OR butterflies) NOT sparrow will search for items
that contain either the word birds or butterflies and
do not contain the word sparrow.
birds NOT (sparrow robin) will search for items that contain
the word birds but do not contain both the words sparrow and robin (remember,
a space between terms defaults to an AND operator).
birds NOT (sparrow OR robin) will search for items that
contain the word birds but do not contain either of the
words sparrow or the word robin.
Stopwords are words that appear so frequently in text that they lose their usefulness as search terms. JSTOR search ignores the followings list of stopwords to avoid searches which find almost every document searched:
JSTOR's stopwords:
a, an, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, of, on, such,
that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with
NOTE: JSTOR search does recognize the stopwords AND, OR, and NOT as Boolean operators, which will affect your search if you include them. When searching for a phrase, stopwords will not be considered Boolean operators, and the search will either find your exact phrase or return nothing at all. Otherwise, all non-Boolean stopwords are ignored.
Wildcards can be used to represent one or more characters in a search term. A question mark (?) can be used for single character searching and an asterisk (*) can be used for multiple character searching. Wildcards are typically used to search for alternate spellings of the same word and to search for variations on a root word. Please note, wildcard characters cannot be used in place of the first letter of a word and cannot be used within an exact phrase search.
Single Character
Using a question mark (?) wildcard allows you to replace one letter in a
word. A search query with the term te?ts will find the
words tents, tests, texts,
and any other five-lettered words that start with te- and
end with -ts.
Multiple Character
You can use an asterisk (*) to match more than one letter. A search on bird* will
find bird, birding, birdman, birds,
and other words that start with bird-.
Wildcard characters may be used in a field search: au:sm?th or ti:shakespeare*
Other examples:
NOTE: The closer to the start of a term the wildcard appears, the longer your query will take to process. Using multiple wildcards within a single search term will also result in longer search times.
JSTOR allows you to search for the singular and plural form of a word at the same time, by adding an ampersand (&) to the end of the singular form of a word. The search engine:
Adds s and es where applicable. Searching for
Doubles s and z before adding es. Searching for
Changes y to i and f to v before adding es. Searching for
NOTE: The plural operator can only locate regular plurals in English. It will not find irregular plural forms (person/people and goose/geese), or plurals in other languages (beau/beaux).
JSTOR allows you to find terms that are within a specific number of words of each other using the tilde (~) as a proximity operator. For example, to search for an item with the terms debt and forgiveness within ten words of each other, you would construct the following query:
NOTE: Proximity searches are based on word count only. All punctuation is ignored.
You can find words with similar spellings to your search term by using the fuzzy search feature. The fuzzy operator is a tilde at the end of a search term.
For example, the query ti:dostoyevsky~ will help to locate articles with dostoyevsky in the title, as well as the variants dostoevsky, dostoievski, dostoevsky, dostoyevski, dostoevskii, dostoevski, etc.
NOTE: Fuzzy searching searches a potentially very large number of words. Narrowing a fuzzy search to title or other narrow field is highly recommended.
Many factors influence the relevancy ranking of results at JSTOR. The following are the most important factors:
Please keep in mind that these factors work in conjunction so that, for example, even though your search results may contain full-length articles which get a higher base score than reviews, reviews may be ranked higher as a result of having your search terms appear more frequently.
You can increase the importance of any term in your search by boosting its
relevance score using the caret symbol (^) followed by a
number ("the boost factor"). The format is as follows: term^number
For example, the query: cat^7 dog gives an instance of the
word cat in an item seven times more weight than the word dog.
Last updated on March 22, 2007
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