We study the existence of standing waves of fractional Schr ödinger equations with a potential term and a general nonlinear term:where s ∈ (0, 1), N > 2s is an integer and V(x) ≤ 0 is radial. More precisely, we investigate the minimizing problem with L 2 -constraint:Under general assumptions on the nonlinearity term f (u) and the potential term V(x), we prove that there exists a constant α 0 ≥ 0 such that E(α) can be achieved for all α > α 0 , and there is no global minimizer with respect to E(α) for all 0 < α < α 0 . Moreover, we propose some criteria determining α 0 = 0 or α 0 > 0.