April 4, 2008
Frequent users of the scholarly journal archive JSTOR may notice a few changes to its interface beginning on Friday, April 4. Besides a renovated homepage, new search capabilities and features such as “MyJSTOR” make the new platform easier to use.
“MyJSTOR” is the first step in providing greater personal customization for users throughout the site. Users can now manage citations over time by saving them to an account where they can be stored indefinitely. Users can also accept JSTOR’s terms and conditions of use once, rather than being prompted to respond with each article print or download.
JSTOR basic searches, which search the full-text of all journals, can now be entered directly from the homepage by authorized users and limited by discipline. Advanced searches can be limited by selecting disciplines or specific journal titles, or by directly entering a specific title into the form. Also, proximity search is now available in the advanced search form, using near 5, near 10, or near 25 operators in the pull-down menus. Searches from an individual session will now be saved, and they can be rerun from a dropdown menu at the bottom of each of the search forms. Users are also able to search for both the singular and plural versions of a word by adding an ampersand (&) to the end of the singular form of the word.
Also, JSTOR now offers articles in a single, improved PDF format for printing. The PDF versions of articles provide bookmarks for easier navigation, both throughout the article and the entire issue.
The JSTOR database is an archive of important scholarly journals, offering researchers high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages. It now includes more than 37,000 articles from The American Mathematical Monthly, from 1894 to 2003.
Access to the JSTOR archive is provided by many college, university, and other libraries. To find out if your library is a JSTOR participant, use one of the following links:
United States: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_na.html.
Other Countries: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_intl.html.
If your library is not on one of the above lists, look for a nearby library that does have JSTOR access and is open to the public. Members of the MAA have the option of purchasing an individual subscription to JSTOR that gives them access to the archives of The American Mathematical Monthly, Mathematics Magazine, and The College Mathematics Journal. For complete details on the improved JSTOR platform, visit http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/newFeatures.jsp.