Guide
How to search J-STAGE for Japanese medical research
Thousands of Japanese medical journals live on one platform that most literature searches never touch. Here's how to work it, in English.
The short answer
J-STAGE is Japan's national academic journal platform, operated by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. It hosts over 3,000 journals, a large share of them from medical, nursing, rehabilitation, and public health societies, and much of it open access. Most of those titles were never indexed in MEDLINE, so a PubMed-only search does not see them. You can search J-STAGE in English, and you will retrieve more if you also enter Japanese terms.
What J-STAGE actually covers
- Society journals. Japanese academic societies publish their journals here rather than through commercial platforms, which is why the coverage looks unusual from a Western vantage point: strong in rehabilitation, geriatrics, dialysis and nephrology, occupational health, kampo (traditional Japanese) medicine, and nursing.
- Bilingual metadata, monolingual text. Many records carry an English title and abstract even when the full text is Japanese only.
- Conference abstracts and proceedings. Useful for tracing work that never reached a journal article, and a legitimate source of grey literature for a review.
- DOIs on most records, which makes citing and deduplicating against CrossRef straightforward.
Searching it directly
Go to jstage.jst.go.jp and switch the interface to English. Then:
- Use Advanced Search, not the single box. The advanced form lets you scope to title, abstract, author, or full text, and combine lines with AND / OR.
- There is no MeSH-style thesaurus. J-STAGE has no controlled vocabulary comparable to MeSH or DeCS, so retrieval depends entirely on the words in the record. Build in synonyms and truncation deliberately.
- Add the Japanese terms. Even two or three well-chosen terms widen results substantially — for example 脳卒中 (stroke), リハビリテーション (rehabilitation), 無作為化比較試験 (randomised controlled trial), 高齢者 (older adults).
- Filter by publication year and journal after searching, not before. The facets are reliable; pre-limiting hides records with incomplete dates.
- Record your hit counts and the search date. PRISMA requires both, and J-STAGE does not offer a saved-strategy history to reconstruct later.
A worked line of attack
Say your question is exercise therapy for stroke rehabilitation in older adults:
Line 1: stroke OR cerebrovascular OR 脳卒中 OR 脳梗塞 Line 2: rehabilitation OR exercise OR リハビリテーション OR 運動療法 Line 3: elderly OR older OR aged OR 高齢者 Combine: 1 AND 2 AND 3
Run the same three lines in English-only form first and note the count, then again with the Japanese terms added. The difference between the two numbers is the part of the literature an English-only strategy would have dropped — worth reporting in your methods.
Where J-STAGE ends
J-STAGE is not the whole of the Japanese medical literature. Ichushi-Web (Japana Centra Revuo Medicina), maintained by the Japan Medical Abstracts Society, is the comprehensive Japanese medical index, and it is subscription-based with a Japanese-language interface. If your review is specifically about a Japanese population or a treatment used mainly in Japan, budget for Ichushi access or a Japanese-reading collaborator. For most reviews, J-STAGE plus the international indexes is a defensible and large improvement over English-only.
Searching J-STAGE alongside everything else
The reason J-STAGE gets dropped from protocols is friction: a separate interface, no thesaurus, no strategy history, and abstracts in a language most reviewers don't read.
Symmathy queries J-STAGE at the same time as PubMed, Europe PMC, Cochrane, ClinicalTrials.gov, LILACS, DOAJ, HAL, OpenAlex, CrossRef, ThaiJO, and KoreaMed, translates Japanese titles and abstracts inline, deduplicates the overlap, keeps a per-source record count for your PRISMA flow diagram, and links every record back to its original J-STAGE page.
It does not grade, rank, or recommend studies. Screening and appraisal stay with you.
Frequently asked
What is J-STAGE?
J-STAGE is the electronic journal platform run by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). It hosts more than 3,000 journals from Japanese academic societies, including a large body of clinical medicine, nursing, rehabilitation, and public health research. Many of its articles are open access and a substantial share are published only in Japanese.
Can you search J-STAGE in English?
Yes. The J-STAGE interface has an English toggle, and most records carry an English title and often an English abstract, because Japanese societies commonly publish bilingual metadata. However, searching only in English misses records whose title and abstract exist solely in Japanese, so pairing English terms with Japanese equivalents retrieves noticeably more.
Is J-STAGE indexed in PubMed?
Only partly. Some Japanese society journals are indexed in MEDLINE, but the majority of J-STAGE titles are not, so their contents do not appear in a PubMed search at all. This is why J-STAGE is treated as a supplementary regional source in systematic review protocols.
Should a systematic review search Japanese databases?
The Cochrane Handbook recommends supplementing international indexes with regional databases to reduce language and geographic bias. For topics where Japanese groups run substantial clinical work — stroke rehabilitation, geriatrics, dialysis, kampo medicine, occupational health — J-STAGE and Ichushi-Web are where a meaningful part of the trial literature sits.
How does Symmathy search J-STAGE?
Symmathy queries J-STAGE in parallel with PubMed, Europe PMC, Cochrane, ClinicalTrials.gov, LILACS, DOAJ, HAL, OpenAlex, CrossRef, ThaiJO, and KoreaMed from one search box, translates Japanese titles and abstracts inline, deduplicates overlap, and links every record back to its original J-STAGE entry. Symmathy does not grade, rank, or recommend studies.