Users can enter standard words to search the full text of the papers. If a phrase is entered, for example Civil Service, it will search the full text for either use of service and civil.

In particular, users are also encouraged to exploit the date ranges to narrow the range of search results. As there are over 92,000 pages and around 810 words per page, this approximates 74m words in the Papers in total. Entering a start year (e.g. "1936") and a finish year (e.g. "1938") will provide a more efficient search.

Using capital or lowercase letters makes no difference.