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Database Profiles:JSTOR

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About

JSTOR is great for full-text journal articles on humanities and social science topics

JSTOR logo

JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is an interdisciplinary database that is especially useful for English/literature, history, and political science. In addition to full text of many academic journals and ebooks, JSTOR has a range of collections of primary sources, including 19th century British pamphlets.

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JSTOR - Video Tutorials

JSTOR In a Minute: Search Tips (from JSTOR's Vimeo page, where there are many more useful videos!)

Search Tips & Tricks

Add snippets of the articles in your search results to your results page! If you want a glimpse into an article in your results list without taking the time to click into it, checking the "Add Snippets" box at the top of the results will give you that glimpse.

jstor snippets


quick optionsQuick options appear to the right of each item in the results list (just like it appears here). These options include downloading the PDF of the article, if you want to get it now and look it over later, adding the item to "My Lists" (you will need to make a free JSTOR account for that), and citing the item in several different styles.


If you need historical documents for your project, you can limit your search results by publication date. This option appears on the left-hand side of the screen. Just enter the date range (in years) that you are looking for, and voila! Historical documents appear.


JSTOR Advanced Search has a look and feel that is similar to EBSCOhost databases such as Academic Search Elite: individual search boxes connected with the Boolean operator AND. You can add fields with the blue button below the bottom search field, as well as change the Boolean operator that connects each field. AND will probably be the most useful, however. You can use OR and NOT within the individual search fields. jstor advanced

Note that the "Full Text" next to the search boxes does not mean that your search results will pull up only full-text articles. This "Full Text" means that JSTOR will search the entire text of an article for the search terms you use. If you want ONLY full-text articles in your results, use the "Select an access type" drop-down menu. "Read and download" is the default, and this is where you want to leave it if you want to be able to access PDFs of articles. However, UI Libraries may have access to some of the non-full-text content through other databases using UI Link, so select "All content" from this menu if you don't want your results to be limited by full-text only.