This a quick place to start--enter a keyword or search terms in the search box on the JSTOR homepage.
Find exact phrases by placing words within quotation marks
Examples: “to be or not to be”, "United States of America"
Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to build a better search
Example: "tea trade” AND China, "Soviet Union OR Russia"
We recommend using the Advanced Search. This option allows you to build more specific searches and narrow your results with filters--resulting in a smaller number of results that are more relevant.
Terms: Use multiple Term(s) boxes to build complex searches
Example: "tea trade” AND China, "Soviet Union OR Russia"
Fileds: Select from the field drop-downs to limit only search for terms in the item title, author, abstract, or caption text.
Access Type:
If you need to find an article right now, select the "Content I can access" option
If you can wait a few days to get the article through interlibrary loan, select the "Everything" option
Item Type: Select the type of items you are looking for
Language: Unless you can read another language fluently, we recommend selecting English
Publication Date: If you are looking for primary resources, enter the date range of that time period
View one of JSTOR's Featured Subjects. Clicking on a subject takes you to a list of journals on that particular general subject where you can use the search box under the heading to search within the subject.
Explore collections of images and primary sources from libraries, museums, and archives around the world. Each collection may include original materials such as artwork, photographs, publications, recordings, and other artifacts.
View a list of all journals, books, pamphlets, and research reports titles--not article titles. Unless you are looking for a specific journal or eBook, avoid browsing by title.
View a list of organizations that publish materials featured in JSTOR. Ignore this search option, unless you have a specific reason to use it!
Examples:
Example: (women OR woman OR female) AND leadership.
Example: instead of searching for bubonic plague, search for "bubonic plague" -- this will find results where the two words are next to each other.
Using wildcards can help you find variants of a search term; however, it will return a very large number of results. Wildcard characters cannot be used in place of the first letter of a word or within an exact phrase search.
Tilde symbol (~)
You can find words with spellings similar to your search term by using the tilde (~) symbol at the end of a search term.
Example: Searching for dostoyevsky~ helps find items with dostoyevsky, as well as variant spellings like dostoevsky, dostoievski, dostoevsky, dostoyevski, dostoevskii, dostoevski, etc.
Asterisk (*)
Used for searching for words with the same root spelling.
Example: Searching for behavior* searches for behavior, behavioral, behaviorist, behaviorism, or behaviorally.
Question mark (?)
Used for single-character searching.
Examples: Searching for wom?n finds the words woman, women, womyn and searching for organi?ation finds organization or organisation.
Access Type: limit your results to content you can access now OR search everything and see all results, including content you cannot download or read online (don't worry, you can request these items through interlibrary loan)
Content Type: Limit your results by publication type--view only journal articles, book chapters, or research reports.
Primary Source Content: option to filter results by the type of primary source. (Serial= Journals)
Citations include identifying information, such as the author, journal title, date of publication, volume, etc. Below is a citation in JSTOR and a breakdown of the various citation elements.
Journal Title: American Music
Publication Year: 2018
Volume: 36
Issue: 4
Pages: 467-486
Article Title: "Young, Scrappy, and Hungry”: Hamilton, Hip Hop, and Race
Author: Kajikawa, Loren