How to Use JSTOR (for students)

When you visit JSTOR you'll see basic search first. You can put in phrases, keywords, authors or titles without any special formatting. This will give you a broad list of result. If you're a more advanced searcher, you can put Boolean commands directly into the search bar.

It's important to note that there is a 200 character limit in this search (this includes spaces).  

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 the last name “Cats,” it can be discouraging to see over 80,000 articles about felines).

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”

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.