When you enter JSTOR, after logging in, you'll be taken to the home page. From there you can do a basic search for all content, or just images using the tabs above the search bar. For this walkthrough, we will be using the Advanced Search.
When you click on Advanced Search, right next to the title is a link labelled Search Help. Clicking on this will lead you to a list of resources to help you with a more in-depth search.
Below the Advanced Search, you can narrow your results by item type, language, date, title of the journal or book, ISBN, and discipline and/or journal.
For this example we will search "iron age" textiles. When searching a phrase that you want to stay together, use (" ") quotation marks around the phrase so that the words are searched in this exact order, and not individually.
The field drop down next to the term(s) bar allows you to choose where the term or phrase can be found. For now we will just type into the first term(s) bar "iron age". For the second term we will type in textile*.
The (*) is used to broaden your search. In the case of textile* the results can include textile, and textiles. This is known as a wildcard. More information on using wildcards can be found in the Search Help link included above.
Below the initial advanced search are some filters to help you narrow your results, including item type, language, publication date, title, ISBN, and subject.
This search resulted in 4,394 results. In order to narrow down these results, you can search within the results in the Refine Results bar, and/or narrow the results by content type, date, subject, language, and access type.
You will want to narrow it down as 4,394 results are a lot to browse. You can do this by selecting one, or many subjects.
You can select subjects either in the Refine Results bar, or by selecting it when you initially do an advanced search. Whichever you choose, it will lead to the same results. By selecting British Studies, we end up with 59 results.
From here you can choose to narrow down our results even more, or you can begin to examine our results. To narrow down, you can select more of the options in the Refine Results bar, or do a search.
You can search within results in order to narrow them down more. We will search weaving in the search bar, which will lead to 23 results.
We are able to sort our results by Relevance, Newest, and Oldest.
The results screen will show the title, author(s) of the journal article, where the chapter or article is sourced from, access type, and selected phrases from the text and abstract that highlight the relevant search terms. On the right of each chapter or article, we can quickly cite, download, or save each result. Likewise, on the left of the title, you can select the box next to each chapter or article you want to save or cite quickly.
In order to save the chapters or articles, you'll need to sign up for a free JSTOR account.
You can click the title in order to see more information about the article, and to read it. This is what you'll see when you click on a chapter or article.
In the highlighted box, you can see there are buttons to cite, share, save, and download the chapter or article. Clicking on cite will pull up a box that will include MLA, Chicago, and APA citations for the article, and links to export the citation.
One last thing to note is on the left of the article is a drop down of Search Matches. Selecting one will take you to a relevant page in the article related to the terms you searched.