Getting Better Results with JSTOR

Tips for searching this database

JSTOR Searches Broadly-- You'll be likely to find something on many topics.

JSTOR shows citations to articles, reports, book chapters,  e-books, book reviews, and other materials in a wide range of disciplines. It often but not always includes the text of articles in pdf. History, language and literature, sociology, mathematics, business and political science journals are particularly well-represented in the JSTOR collections we have; other areas may have limited coverage.

Most journals in JSTOR are present from their first issues, but do not always include the most recent years. There is often a three-to-five year lag between what is archived in JSTOR and what is currently published.

JSTOR searches broadly, so it almost always finds something. Under the Advanced Search, use the lists of journals by subject and limit by type of publication to get more exact results. 

The materials that are cited in JSTOR are not always available through JSTOR, but you may use the Find It button to locate items in another database or request them through Interlibrary Loan (ILL/ILLiad.) if we don't have access through UARK.

Check our holdings through our catalog or through the A-Z list of electronic journals, then use Interlibrary Loan (ILL or ILLiad) if the journal is not available through JSTOR or another electronic database.

JSTOR Searching Summary

JSTOR's Boolean searching default is AND: the search flower pot= flower AND pot. A space between words is treated as AND, unless otherwise modified.

To be more specific, if you want the phrase, use "flower pot" with quotation marks.

As another example, the phrase Chinese culture without quotation marks yields more than 500,000 results as a search in JSTOR without any other limiters; "Chinese culture" yields about 28,000, which is still a lot, but more manageable.

If you want to use OR between synonyms, you must put the words in parentheses (note the "wildcard" represented by an asterisk. This allows the search to return more results by including variable endings of a root word).

For example:(ritual* OR ceremon* OR rite*) and funeral

The order of your keywords matters; earlier in the search is considered more important. Some words are 'stop words' which are ignored. Capitalization does not matter, except for operators such as OR.

You may use a tilde~ as a proximity symbol-- that is, you can put in search terms~15 to get those search terms within fifteen words of each other.