What’s in this Article:
- What is different about searching content on JSTOR?
- Basic Search Overview
- Refining Results in Basic Search
- Using the Text Analyzer
What is 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 this video:
Basic Search Overview
The JSTOR homepage highlights a general search bar for convenient searching of text and images. You can enter keyword phrases, keywords, authors, and/or titles without any special formatting to return a broad list of results. Alternatively, you have the option to use Boolean operator search and other shortcuts directly in the search bar to get more specific search results.
You can use Boolean search with keywords by selecting what is called an operator (such as AND, OR, NOT) to modify your keywords or phrases.
The Advanced Search also contains a Boolean Search drop-down menu option.
There is a 200-character limit in this search (note: this includes spaces).
Refining Results in Basic Search
You might notice that as you start typing, a dropdown menu appears. This prompts you to refine your results. This is a great feature for common synonyms.
For example, if you’re looking for articles by an author with a last name containing “Cats,” you might be discouraging to see over 100,000 results about the animal.
Note: exact result count will vary.
You can also create these filters manually by typing your search terms into some specialized formatting. For example, if you only want to see articles that appear within the journal Fairy Tale Review, you can type:
jo: “Fairy Tale Review”
into the basic search and press “Enter” to see only articles that appear within that journal (Looking to browse through a journal instead? We have some tips on our “Searching within a Specific Journal or Book” article).
You can also use the codes for:
- author = au: “searchterm”
- title = ti: “searchterm”
- journal = jo: “searchterm”
Using the Text Analyzer
An exciting option for beginning your search on JSTOR is the Beta Text Analyzer. After going to the Text Analyzer home page, you can select a document from your computer—it can be a research paper you have created or it can be a document created by someone else that is relevant to your research—and drag and drop it into the analyzer to get search results.