The Date Range filter on journals does not ask when a journal was published. It asks whether the journal was created or last edited inside the window you set, and either one on its own is enough to bring it back. A journal written months ago that somebody edited on Tuesday counts as a Tuesday journal to this filter, which is why a three day window returns work that is plainly older than three days.
A journal has no publish date to filter on
A journal carries two timestamps: the moment it was created, and the moment it was last saved. There is no separate publication date field on a journal, unlike a publication, which has one. The feed's Most Recent order reads the creation timestamp. Date Range reads both, and a hit on either puts the journal in your results.
That means editing changes what the filter believes. Correcting a typo in a two year old journal moves its last edited timestamp to today, and the journal starts appearing in every window that covers today. Nothing about the journal's own date has changed, and its place under Most Recent does not move.
The end date is not part of the range
Both dates are read as midnight at the start of that day. Your from day is covered in full. Your to day is not covered at all, because the window closes the instant that day begins. A journal published on the last day of your range will not come back, no matter how you set it.
Set the "to" date one day past the last day you want. To cover through today, set it to tomorrow.
On a keyword search, the window is ignored completely
The search page opens on Relevance, which runs a different search engine to the feeds. That engine only recognises date filters written as a single word, and a range made of two dates matches none of the words it knows, so no date filtering is applied at all. Journals from years back come through untouched.
The confusing part is the result count. Once any filter is present, the page reports how many results the ranking pass examined rather than how many exist, so the number drops sharply while the results themselves are unchanged. It reads like the filter worked.
Change the sort to Most Recent. That runs the search through the ordinary filtering path, where the window is genuinely applied.
What to do instead
- For newest first reading, remove Date Range and sort by Most Recent. That order reads the creation timestamp, which is the closest thing a journal has to a publish date.
- If you need a window, set the sort to Most Recent before you set the range, and put the "to" date one day beyond your last day.
- Read the dates on the cards. A journal in your results dated outside your window is there for an edit, not because something broke.
The publications filter says "Published on" and means the same thing
On publications the same control is labelled Published on, and it behaves exactly as the journals one does: created or last edited, not the Publication Date on the publication. So a publication dated last year is returned by a "Published on" window covering this week if it was edited this week. The publications feed's own ordering does read the Publication Date. The filter does not.