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What's different about searching content on JSTOR?
Searching on JSTOR is different from other search engines such as Google because of the scholarly content and focus on research that we make available. For a quick search overview, watch the following video.
Performing a basic search
The search bar on the JSTOR homepage allows you to search across all types of content including text, image, video, and audio. You can enter one or more keywords, authors, and/or titles without any special formatting to return a broad list of results. Putting quotation marks around multiple terms will search for an exact phrase.
You can also use Boolean operators such as AND, OR, or NOT to get more specific search results. If you enter multiple search terms without an operator, they'll be joined with AND. So a search for "cats mice" (without quotation marks) will only return items if they match both "cats" and "mice".
You can enter up to 200 characters (which includes spaces) in the search bar.
Refining your search in the search bar
You might notice as you start typing, a drop-down menu appears. This lets you refine your search by choosing a common field to search in. This is a good feature for when your search term could match multiple fields.
For example, if you’re looking for articles by an author with the last name “Cats”, you might be discouraged to see over 200,000 results about the animal. By selecting Author or creator from the drop-down, you can limit your search results to matches with "Cats" in the author field only.
Sorting your search results
By default, your search results will be sorted with the most relevant matches first. Relevance is determined primarily by how many matches there are between your search terms and an item's metadata and full text. Matches in an item's title or author/creator are given more weight than matches in other fields or within the full text of an item.
You can use the Sort by drop-down menu before the results list to change how your results are sorted. For text, video, and audio content, you can sort by Relevance, Newest, or Oldest.
If you're searching for images, you can also sort alphabetically by Title or Creator, or by image Resolution.