How to Search JSTOR: Using the Advanced Search

Limiting a Search to a Specific Field

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

• If you limit your search to the abstract field, you will search only a subset of the journal content on JSTOR. JSTOR doesn't create abstracts for content that was published without them; abstracts exist for only about 10% of the articles.  Abstracts tend to be more common in certain disciplines (social sciences, sciences) and in more recently published content.
• Captions are searchable for much, but not all of the image content on JSTOR. Some images do not contain captions.

Combining Search Terms

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. Important to know: ​​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.

Narrowing a Search

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.

Limit an Article Search to a Specific Discipline(s)

Focus an article search in specific disciplines and titles using checkboxes. Important to know: discipline searching is currently only available for searching journal content. Selecting this option will exclude ebooks from the search.