For many of you tracking down scholarly journal articles online, JSTOR is a known and trusted archive of journal back issues. For those of you who really want to get all you can out of JSTOR, try out a search tip or two. Keep an eye out in our other databases, as well – a lot of these tips will transfer. The below tricks will help power up your basic searches:
- Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase, like “fermat’s last theorem.”
- Remember your algebra: Group searches with parentheses and use AND/OR/NOT to create searches like “currency reform” AND (russia OR “soviet union”)
- Use a wildcard: A question mark ? will substitute for one character; an asterisk * will substitute for more than one. So, wom?n will find woman, women, and womyn. A search for behavior* will find behavior, behavioral, behaviorist, behaviorism, or behaviorally.
Want more? Wonder what a fuzzy search is? Or would you rather read & print all your tricks at once? JSTOR has an online list of search tips and tricks, tips on saving citations, and tips for printing JSTOR articles.
Even more below the cut:
Watch this search video tutorial for an overview of how to search JSTOR. (Link will open in new window. Don’t like Flash? Choose Quicktime or Windows Media versions here.)
Watch this browse video tutorial if you’d rather browse journals online than search them. (Again, the Quicktime or Windows Media versions.) Both tutorials are quick, coming in at about two minutes each.
If you want to see what the next generation of JSTOR might look like, check out the JSTOR Sandbox, where you’ll see their faceted search interface among other projects.
Questions? Ask a Librarian or leave a comment.