Search Results
The format and display of search results is the same for Basic and Advanced searches.
- Use "Academic Content" option to filter results by journal articles or ebook chapters.
- Use "Primary Source Content" option to filter results by the type of primary source.
- Use the "Publication Date" menu to limit results to a certain publication time period.
- Use the "Subject" menu to limit results to journals related to specific subjects.
- Use the "Access Type" menu to limit your results by type of access.
- Use the "Sort by" menu to view search results by relevance, oldest items, or newest items.
- Use the "Export Selected" menu to choose the export format
Search Relevance
Relevance on JSTOR is a combination of many things. Key elements include:
- More unique terms in the text result in higher scores when searches contain those terms. For example, the keyword “epistemology" gets a greater boost than “university” because it is less common.
- Phrase matches are boosted higher than just keyword matches. A search for "the quick brown fox" will assign higher relevance to a document containing the exact words "the quick brown fox" than a document containing "the brown fox is quick."
- More recent content is given a slight boost.