JSTOR for secondary schools

JSTOR supports full-text keyword searching across all of the content on www.jstor.org. This includes images and content from articles, books, and pamphlets from cover to cover. 

The search bar on any page allows students to get started quickly and then refine their searches in the sidebar. After conducting a search in JSTOR, students can look at the highlighted words in the brief snippets below each result and consider refining their terms. They can also explore the options available in the sidebar on the search results page. This can help students narrow and refine their searches. 

Searching on JSTOR is different from other search engines, such as Google, because of the scholarly content and focus on academic research. On JSTOR students can access peer-reviewed content, research reports, and primary sources that help support scholarly investigation.

This brief video (less than 5 mins) is a good start to teaching students how searching on JSTOR is different from searching on Google. 

Because of the large amount of content available to secondary school students, teaching them how to refine their search terms is helpful. 

Here are some tips on using advanced search techniques on JSTOR:

• Use the drop-down boxes to limit search terms to the title, author, abstract, or caption text.

• Use the drop-down boxes to combine search terms using the Boolean operators, AND/OR/NOT and NEAR 5/10/25. The NEAR operator looks for the combinations of keywords within 5, 10, or 25 words places of each other. The NEAR operator only works when searching for single keyword combinations. For example, you may search for cat NEAR 5 dog, but not "domesticated cat" NEAR 5 dog.

• Use the “Narrow by” options to search only articles, include/exclude book reviews, search for content published during a particular time frame, or in a particular language.

• Focus a text search in specific disciplines and titles using checkboxes. [NOTE: discipline searching is currently only available for searching journal content. Selecting this option will exclude ebooks from the search.]

The following tutorial is a quick guide to search operators and using subject, title, and item type searches to find the content you need. (8 Minutes)