JSTOR search tips

names:

To find all instances of an author's name using the author field, with or without the author's middle name or initial, enter an author's first name and last name on the same line, and select the author field. The search will find the author's name without a middle name or initial, and will also find the author's name with any middle name or initial. If you search using the author's middle name or initial, the search results will only include the author's name with the middle name or initial.

Uses the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NEAR, as well as ANDNOT (most other databases use Boolean NOT). When you combine keywords with "AND" in a full-text search, you find all instances in which both keywords appear in the same article. Using "OR" between keywords allows to you find all articles which contain either keyword. Searches using "NEAR" finds instances when the keywords occur within 10 words (a typical sentence) or 25 words (about a paragraph) of each other.

SEARCHING:

This is a very literal database and does not allow truncation or stemming EXECPT for plurals. So you must search "region or regional" to find variants of the stem "region". You'd need to do the same for variant spelling of words (e.g., "labor" or "labour") and also try spelling out acronyms (e.g., "NATO" or "North Atlantic Treaty Organization"). For keyword searches, use synonyms: (e.g., "regions or locales or areas").

Add a + to the end of the singular form of the word to get plurals. For example:

box+ will find box and boxes.
quiz+ will find quiz and quizzes.
knife+ will find knife and knives.

It only works for english rules. Therefore, it will NOT find the plurals of words such as hippopotamus (hippopotami) or vertex (vertices).

Your search results are scored according to how many times your search terms appear and how close your terms appear to the beginning of the article.

For some reason, if a search terms is on the 63rd page of an article or after, these pages aren't individually identified. You'll see the following: "and in pp. 63ff." Which means that the terms are on page 63 or one or more of the subsequent pages.

Citations and abstracts with special characters or formatting in the original print journal, like chemical formulae, mathematical formulae and, Greek or other notations will be displayed in one of two ways:

1.formatted and laid out in HTML, and making use of special fonts. This will, to the extent possible with HTML and Unicode fonts, appear as close as possible to the original article.
" unformatted", as the "raw" LaTeX formating code that JSTOR uses to store the special character and formatting information.
2.The formatted text is the default display, and where there is this kind of special formatting present, there will always be a link to the raw LaTeX display at the end of the citation.

For more information about special characters and formatting display see the URL:
http://0-www.jstor.org.janus.uoregon.edu/help/special.display.html

Condensed from and for more information see the following URL:
http://0-www.jstor.org.janus.uoregon.edu/help/search.html

URL:http://libweb.uoregon.edu/guides/math/mathstep_jstor1.html
Last revision: October 28, 2004 by Annie Zeidman-Karpinski
Created by annie zeidman-karpinski, University of Oregon Libraries